


Dizzy in Dissonance

by ridiculoustales



Series: Faltering in Normality [1]
Category: Durarara!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Concussions, Developing Relationship, Enemies to Friends, Fights, Flirting, Gangs, Guilt, Insomnia, M/M, Major Character Injury, Nightmares, Raijin Days, Self-Hatred, Worry, au where things go different in high school, izaya is still the same little shit, shizuo feels kind of guilty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-15
Updated: 2017-12-29
Packaged: 2018-12-15 18:49:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 33
Words: 45,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11812068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ridiculoustales/pseuds/ridiculoustales
Summary: Shizuo and Izaya have built up a pattern in their fights, and injuries are never any more severe than minor cuts and bruises.  But when Shizuo manages to get a hit on Izaya, knocking him out and leaving him with a minor concussion, he will end up facing a choice as he realizes for the first time what it would mean if he killed someone, even if that someone was Izaya.





	1. Unfocused Holdings

“Really, Shizu-chan, is violence all you can offer?”

“Shut up and don’t call me that,” Shizuo growls, throwing yet another punch, fruitlessly, in an attempt to actually make contact with Izaya’s skin.

They’ve ended up at the back of the school, far from the view of the sports teams or teachers or any remaining students on their way home.  It’s unusual, for them to be fighting in a place so secluded, but Shizuo isn’t paying much attention to the surroundings other than to glance around for something to toss towards Izaya.

“If I had known that when I met you, I might have offered you a job as my bodyguard,” Izaya drawls, the sound tight with the strain he’s exerting as he dodges each attack Shizuo throws at him.  Sometimes literally.

“I don’t want to work with you, you lousy bastard!”  Shizuo has his hand around the pole of a sign now, clenching the metal so hard that it capitulates under the force that feels so minimal to him and bends towards his grip to favor his attention.

“Aw, that’s too bad, Shizu-chan,” he lilts, insincerity crystalline under his tone.  He sidesteps as Shizuo swings the sign in his hand to get a better grip on it.  “I thought we might be able to-“

Shizuo doesn’t think he’ll hit him.  He swings with as little calculation as always, expects to be swinging again in another few seconds, expects to be hearing Izaya’s voice throughout the whole ordeal.  But instead his words are cut off with a sound that tells of Shizuo’s success, and in a first-time experience he watches as Izaya drops to the ground at the impact.

Shizuo only thinks to break a chuckle free from the force of his ire.

“Finally got you!” he roars through his almost-genial laughter.  “What were you saying now, Izaya-kun?”

He expects Izaya to come back with a fresh taunt, to wrest the triumphant feeling from Shizuo and crumble it under the words on his tongue.  But instead he’s holding the side of his head that Shizuo hit with the sign, uncurling himself from the position he fell into on the ground just moments before, slowly and unsteadily.  The knife he always carries is still clutched tightly, unsheathed and just as threatening, but somehow in the shaking grip Izaya suddenly has on it, it looks more precarious than before.

“Well, congratulations, then,” he finally says, sounding breathless and startled and not as nearly as sharp as before.  “But I think you underestimate me.”  He’s standing again now, face-to-face once again with Ikebukuro’s beast, blade in hand.  “Shizu-chan.”

Shizuo doesn’t think twice about swinging again.  But this time Izaya manages to dodge, jumping to the side with so much grace it makes Shizuo dizzy in following the movement with his eyes.  He growls in annoyance, swings again.

“Haha, thought you could get me again, monster?”

“Shut _up_ , I-za-ya-kun,” Shizuo gives with another wave of motion, before dropping the sign and switching to his fists for a second time today.

It falls quiet after that.  It’s a little unbearably quiet.  Shizuo is used to the constant taunts that fall from Izaya’s mouth so fluidly as if he stays up all night and memorizes them for this exact purpose, but he doesn’t say anything.  He’s dodging, still, even gets in a few minor cuts on Shizuo, he thinks, but it’s hard to tell without being able to feel it.  The smirk on him is fading fast, though, his eyebrows furrowing and capitulating to the irritation Shizuo thinks he feels; but then he sees him stumble, and Izaya stops dead in his tracks, swinging on his feet, blinking hard.

“Oi, what the hell-“

Shizuo doesn’t get out what he was trying to say before Izaya collapses on the ground with a loud _thud_.

His voice comes out more perturbed than he thinks he feels.  “Izaya?”

No response.

“Oi, Izaya.”

Shizuo grabs him by the shoulder and hoists him up, tensing in the premonition of a knife at his skin, but Izaya is unconscious, switchblade left on the ground under him, body limp in Shizuo’s hold.  As he looks closer he realizes that there’s a small, steady stream of blood on the back of his head where Shizuo clipped him with the sign.

“Shit,” he hisses, lifting Izaya fully off the ground and holding him awkwardly on his knee.  “How the hell were you still standing?”

He tries a little haphazardly to wake him up, shaking him as lightly as he can with it being _Izaya_ and calling his name stupidly, as if just those syllables will be enough to wake him from the blow of Shizuo’s almost-full-strength.

“Izaya, shit, come on,” he calls again, panic settling into him as he watches the blood drip down onto the pavement underneath them.  “ _Izaya-kun_.”

This time, Shizuo expects there to be no answer.

“Shit,” he repeats, pulling Izaya into his arms and wincing at the blood soaking into his shirt as he does so.

The school’s not far from Shinra’s house, not for Shizuo, anyway, and as he breaks into a semi-sprint towards it, he can almost forget why he’s doing so.

But the blood is soaking down to his skin, and Izaya’s unconscious-weighted breath is coming against the front of his jacket, and the extra weight, as minimal as it is, to himself is too apparent in his panicked hyper-aware state to just ignore.

When he finally gets to Shinra’s front door, his breathing is coming ragged and his heart is beating triple its normal rate, and panic is as much in charge of it as the nominal physical exertion.  He sets Izaya against the wall adjacent to the door as carefully as he can, and knocks so hard on the wood that he can faintly see the imprints of his knuckles settling in.

“Coming, coming!” he hears through the door, the cheerfulness easy to identify without seeing the face that it attaches to, but it’s in Shizuo’s view anyway in less than 20 seconds, and he almost can’t think of anything to say until Shinra’s gaze averts to Izaya propped against the wall with the heaviness of injury.  “…What’s happened?”

“He hit his head,” Shizuo says immediately.  “Well, _I_  hit his head, I guess.”

“How long?”  Shinra’s face goes cold and urgent to match his voice as he steps out of the doorway and behind Shizuo to where Izaya is.

“What?”

“How long has he been unconscious, when did you knock him out?”  It has the edge of anger to it, but Shizuo is too perturbed to respond to it.

“I don’t know, not that long.  He didn’t pass out right away, though.”

“His head is bleeding, did you put pressure on it?”

“Uh, no, should I ha-“

“Go inside and bring a clean cloth, whatever you find first, it doesn’t matter what.”  He looks up at him with the dourest face Shizuo has ever seen him wear, and not even for a moment does he think of protesting.

He shakes his shoes off swiftly in the doorway and starts down the hall, nervous energy tugging on his every limb.  The first thing he finds is a towel, conveniently, sitting on the living room table with more folded laundry.  He grabs it quickly and shuffles back to the front door, and Shinra is there waiting for him, grabbing the towel brisker than Shizuo can get a hold on what is happening.

“Don’t head wounds bleed a lot no matter what?” he asks, the panic ebbing to mild relief as he watches Shinra press the towel to Izaya’s head with a look that speaks of focus but not of apprehension.

“Yes, but not everyone passes out from them,” Shinra gives back, with same angry bite as before, making Shizuo flinch a bit.

“Oh,” is all he says.

“Would you mind helping me carry him into the house?”

“Uh, sure."

Shinra lets go of the grip he had on Izaya’s shoulder as he readjusts for Shizuo to lift him up, but even as he does Shinra keeps the towel pressed to the wound, and Shizuo ends up having to move carefully so that he can keep the pressure on it.

It doesn’t take more than a minute or two to get him into the house and on the couch, but to Shizuo it feels like hours, with the slow pace and the constant glances he ends up catching of Izaya’s face pale with hurt or blood loss, he’s not sure which.

“Thanks,” Shinra clips briefly, dancing his attention fully back to Izaya again as he calls out to Celty from the other room.

Shizuo doesn’t stay to see what happens, and is out of the door before Celty even makes her presence known.

He tells himself that he should go home and forget about it, that the flea is always OK after fights, will be this time, too; but he can’t shake the feeling of the blood soaked into his shirt, even after he cleans his clothes of any trace of it, even after he showers and bathes and is in bed after a meal with his family.

It lingers even as it fades into the pattern of his restless sleep, and the faint awareness that he could be a killer is enough to keep him exhausted even in the morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally, I'm posting this story!! I've been super excited for this for a while but I hadn't written it yet, so I'm really excited to be finally getting it down in actual chapter form because before I just had the basic plot in mind. This first update might be a little later than I want because originally I was going to wait until I had a few chapters written before I posted the first one, but I decided to post it earlier rather than later. But when I say "later than I want" I probably don't mean any more than 5 days because I really enjoy writing this story and I hope to get it updated as quickly as possible!


	2. Parsed

The morning is no better than the evening was; even as Shizuo is met with the warmth of his parents’ voices and the safety of knowing that his brother is still unafraid of him, he can’t let the ebb of fear dissipate into the air as easily as the lilting words of his family do.

There’s been a steady stream of pleas and prayers whispering deftly in his head all night, calling upon the gods or anyone, really, to hear him and let him have the peace of not being someone who has killed.  It’s an irrational thought, a selfish one at best, and Shizuo knows this, but it doesn’t stop the anxiety that clenches him on and off every hour he’s awake, and it could never halt the shaking of his hands as he thinks about the blood on his school uniform that may become a constant tangible memory of what he has done.

No one has noticed yet, he thinks, because as his mother serves him and Kasuka breakfast, she gives it with the same singsongy tone that speaks as much to her maternal affection for them as it does to the unspoken “don’t get into too much trouble” that applies more to Shizuo than it does the latter.

“Nii-san,” comes the almost dead-flat voice of Kasuka sitting next to him.

“Y-Yeah?”

“You seem distracted,” he says, stone-weighted dour lacing under his tone, almost too small of an err in his voice for Shizuo to detect.  “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Shizuo replies tentatively.  “Just thinking about a school project.”

Kasuka doesn’t press any further, but Shizuo thinks he could hear the blatant inanity of the statement without having to even look up from his meal.

Shizuo takes the longest way to school he can think of, apprehension gripping him the whole way, so much so that he doesn’t even notice the assumed gang member trying to take a swing at him with a bat until he’s right at the entrance to the school.  It takes less than a minute for the gang member to be on the ground, but even then Shizuo can’t spare the ire it would take to even break a growl free from his throat to match his temper-laced actions.

The first thing he’s greeted with when he walks into his classroom is Shinra, bright and cheery and _Shinra_ , as if nothing at all had happened yesterday other than the ordinary inertia that comes with high school.  Well, most people’s high school.

“Shizuo-kun!” he practically yells.  “Good mor- Oh, you don’t look so well, are you OK?”

“Huh?”  Shizuo hadn’t even noticed that he was looking any different.  “Uh, yeah, I’m fine.”  He waits for a moment before cautiously breaking free the question that has been weighing him down since yesterday afternoon.  “Is- Is Izaya?”

“Eh?  Oh, yeah, Izaya’s OK!” he chirps.  “My dearest Celty is looking after him today to make sure he’s all good to go before he starts moving around again, but other than that he’s the usual Izaya, all right!”

“Oh, so… Did he, uh, get a concussion?”

“Hm?  Of course.  It’s not so bad that he has brain damage, but it’s also not the most minor he could have gone away with, either.”  Shinra keeps his zealous smile and lilt intact.  “But, then again, it was _your_ hit that got him here, so I guess he’s lucky at the end of the day!”

“…Yeah.”  He sounds unconvinced, like the perturbing flake of uneasiness he’s had for almost a whole day now hasn’t eased at all, and he’s sure that his face is no different, but for a moment Shizuo can finally breathe at the immediate fact that someone wasn’t killed by Shizuo’s own blow.

Classes pass by magnanimously quickly, granting Shizuo the luxury of near-constant occupancy in the hours that he is at school.  He’s completely erased any trace of Izaya from his present mind, and it’s not until he’s walking home with Shinra bubbling nonsense about Celty that he even passes a glance at the events that happened a day before.

It’s abrupt, sharp and alarming, and in the wake of Shinra’s loud, buoyant voice, he flinches at the remembrance of it.

“Huh?  Are you OK, Shizuo-kun?”  Shizuo looks at him with what he assumes is a near-pained expression, judging by the one Shinra gives him.  “You flinched just now.  Are you sure you’re all right?  You haven’t really seemed your self all day.”

Shizuo thinks he must flinch again, at the comment Shinra appends at the end.

“I’m fine,” is all he says.  He can feel it stick in his throat, hollow out as he lets the breath free from his lungs.  He’s started to think about the blood on his uniform again.

For a second time today, Shizuo has the feeling that no one so far has believed what he continues to insist, and Shinra just confirms this with a dry laugh.

“Sure, I can see how composed you are about it.”

“About what?”

“You’re worried about Izaya.”

Shizuo nearly chokes on air.  “Worried?  About _Izaya_?”  Not until he says it does he realize how caustic it sounds.  “There would be no use in worrying about a bastard like him.”  It’s only Shinra’s half-grin that comes flashing at him that makes him realize that his normal rough-around-the-edge, ire-dripping voice has come through.

“Then what is it?” he asks, lilting the words so much that Shizuo feels the familiar rise of annoyance at the sound.  He’s thankful for it, in this particular moment.

“Nothing,” he says, with something close to a growl.  “I just didn’t want to have that damn flea’s blood on my hands.”

“I thought that’s what you _did_ want.”

“No!  I-“  Shizuo has to stop himself.

The unsteady self-deprecation is wresting his words from being voiced, he tells himself.  It’s just the oddness in his chest that’s stopping him from being himself, in this stand.  But then he looks back at Shinra, and hears an echo of his words, _I thought that’s what you_ did _want_ , and feels all the blood-flowing anger leave his every limb in instants.

_I don’t want to be a killer._

_Even if it_ is _Izaya._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I originally said that this update would come late but I ended up writing and editing it faster than expected, so it's here early! The next update will come on Sunday, and from there I'll try to keep to a schedule of every three days! Sorry this chapter was kind of short, I didn't want to go too much into the next part because it would be harder to corner off the chapters as cleanly as I wanted. Hope you enjoyed!


	3. Foolish Steps

Shizuo is not far from relieved when Izaya is back the next day, looking and acting his same disgusting self.  It borders on making Shizuo sick with just how OK he is, for all the hesitant fretting he had done over whether or not he had turned into a murderer of _him_.

It’s after school again, but this time Shizuo didn’t wait around for Shinra, and in his haste to make it home before Izaya could find him he ended up taking his way home from the front gates.  It’s the familiarity of being in open space that Shizuo thinks makes him less uneasy.

“So, Shizu-chan, did _knocking me off my feet_ make you feel any better after all my little taunts?” he breathes as he slides into lockstep with Shizuo, who, before, didn’t even try parsing what the footsteps behind him meant, in the hopes that he could keep his momentary serenity for just that much longer.

“Izaya-kun,” Shizuo snarls, vein throbbing visibly in his head as he forces every nerve and muscle in him to stay calm in the face of a taunt incarnate that stands opposite him.  “What the hell do you want?  Once not enough for you?”  He means it.  He doesn’t mention to either himself nor Izaya that it’s directed as much at him as it is to the raven-haired bastard barely inches away from him.

“Hmm?  What’s this, is Shizu-chan trying to be more appealing to society by hiding his true beast-like nature?”  Shizuo doesn’t dare even glance at the kind of face Izaya is giving him.

“Go home,” he clips, speeding up to leave Izaya at the end of the street where they had stopped.  “I’m not fighting you today.”  But Izaya is trotting behind him anyway, almost tentatively, following in Shizuo’s anger as if he can catch it, too, if he just stands close enough.

“Really?  Has the monster of Ikebukuro decided that he can play pretend at human long enough to distract my interest from him?”  It irritates Shizuo how lively he is, makes him think about bashing his head into the pavement, even with his new realization still fresh on his mind from yesterday.

“I’m not going to fight you today,” he repeats, turning down an unfamiliar street sharply in the hopes that Izaya will give up and go home if he’s taken into odd territory.  Shizuo doesn’t know how much he’s underestimating him, and Izaya continues to tread behind.

“Oh, come on, do you really think that a monster like you could ever be human?”

Shizuo skids to a halt.

“Did you think that if you played pretend long enough that it would make you human for real?”  The lilt seems to bend Shizuo towards the sound, as he twists his way into facing Izaya.  “Or maybe you thought that if you believed in it enough that you would wake up tomorrow and be a normal, dirt-obvious, run-of-the-mill human?”

Shizuo seems to have the insanity back to finally dare a glance at Izaya’s face.  His gaze flickers from the top of his head to his eyes, staining blood red into Shizuo’s own plain-brown ones in the timid-sinking sunlight.  From there his eyes focus back enough to get a real look at all of his face, smirk running thin and taut with no real amusement under it, and from there Shizuo can feel the rage in him swell to topple over and burst with superfluous speed.

He grabs the nearest thing to him.  It’s a lamppost, small enough that he doesn’t need to use too much force in bringing it towards him, and in one fluid motion his schoolbag has dropped from his grip and he’s holding the post in both his hands, faintly aware that his throat is trembling under the strain of a growl.  He doesn’t move, though, not right away, because Izaya hasn’t yet shown his knife and Shizuo is still unconsciously unaware of what he wants to do with the makeshift weapon he’s attained.

But then in the same breath Izaya takes to lift a caustic-heavy comment from his chest, the switchblade is in his hand, a new one this time, flashier and more menacing than Shizuo can remember thinking of the last.

His smirk pulls wider with clear-laced mania.  “You do seem to be doing just great with your change, there, Shizu-chan.”

Shizuo swings, the hesitation he was feeling in the moments before dissipating in the flurry of air that comes with the heavy movement, and Izaya jumps right over the low-aimed assault, smirk widening nearly impossibly to the point of cynical insanity that drives Shizuo to keep up his attempts of what others would call murder.

But in Shizuo’s unsettled thoughts, to him this is just a game, at least currently, but even as he gives it a flicker of wonder, he doesn’t stop enough to realize if Izaya thinks it’s a game, too, the way he’s grinning haughty in the wake of Shizuo’s every move.

He vaguely registers as he gives another half-hearted swing that it’s just as quiet in the fight as it was when he knocked Izaya out.  Izaya’s moving with no effort, though, no strain of pain littering visibly on any pattern of his face or hands or footsteps.

But even so…

“Hey!” Shizuo hears himself shout, along with the crash of the lamppost he lets fall from his hands.

Izaya wobbles, eyelids fluttering closed in what Shizuo thinks is unconsciousness, but then he’s stumbling against the pavement, running up against the railing along the road, and blinking his eyes back into focus at his feet.  His knife is still in hand, but as he shakes his head slightly it loosens from his grip and drops to the ground with the bitter tang of incoordination.

“I _said_ I didn’t want to fight today,” Shizuo hisses.

Izaya is blinking maladroitly again, hands steadying against the railing, and when he opens them again to the point of full awareness his eyes are wide but unwavering, startle flooding his features in both face and body.  He looks shocked and unsettled in a way that Shizuo didn’t know he was capable of being, like all that is happening to him in this moment is too much to bear because it’s not in his control.

For a moment his eyelids go heavy again and his body sags a fraction of the way into limpness.

“Hey!” Shizuo says again, taking an unsteady-with-panic step towards him.  “Why can’t you leave yourself out of trouble for once?”

Izaya doesn’t say anything.  He’s steadying again on his feet, eyes coming wide open with near-disquiet, deft in the way he does so, but his hands are gripping to the point of white knuckles on the railing behind him, his weight still pressing into it with the same heavy unease.  He doesn’t move for another few moments, and in that time Shizuo doesn’t either, too afraid that if he does Izaya might collapse under his own feet.

But then he hears him take a shaky breath, and his hands and weight comes away from the railing, and he reaches down to pick up his switchblade, and is walking away from him in a matter of seconds.

It’s exactly as fast as Shizuo fears Izaya would have fallen, but instead all he does is catch a glimpse of Izaya’s face, shaky with what looks like pain, fuzzy with what looks like disappointment, dissipate away into the part of his vision that is not focused into any true sight.

“ _Tch_.”  Shizuo feels the boil of his blood cool to gingerly-placed calm.  It’s almost annoying, to not have the anger linger for any longer than it does.  But as he picks up his bag and starts down the street in the hopes of getting home without another fight, he can feel the rapid beat of his heart that breathes of his relief, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 3!!! I'm really getting into writing this, and I can't wait to post the other chapters I've written so far! Also side note why does no one but google recognize incoordination as a word lol. Hope you enjoy!! :)


	4. Repeat

Izaya's not at school.

Shizuo hadn’t seen him in the morning and didn’t think anything of it, but as he walks home alongside Shinra he concludes it to be too quiet, and decides to ask about it.

“What happened to Izaya?” he asks abruptly, probably cutting into Shinra’s babbling over Celty, but he hasn’t been listening enough to confirm it.

“What do you mean?” Shinra gives back, his head angling up slightly as he looks to Shizuo.

“The bastard finally find some sense not to mess with me or is his head still messed up?”

“Not that I know of.”  He thinks for a moment, face balancing with the tang of incertitude.  “Either of those,” he finally appends.

“He wasn’t at school today, then?”  Shizuo doesn’t know why he’s still talking with the word _Izaya_ on his tongue.

“No, I don’t think so.  Unless he wanted to hide from me, too.”

The street falls to silence after Shinra’s comment, leaving only their footsteps to pattern out any kind of noise that catches their fleeting attention.  Shizuo keeps his own focused on words that don’t feel forced— _good riddance—_ but even as he does his memory flickers to the blood again, and the absence in the day of the person who it once belonged to.

It’s irritatingly clear the way Shizuo feels about it, and even with the echo of Izaya’s usual taunts clear in his head from the day before he can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong, that there’s still the possibility that he will wake up tomorrow and find out that he’s a murderer, that his humanity has been stripped from him in a matter of moments with nothing more than a slip of his hand.

Except that it _wasn’t_ a slip of his hand, it was force that drove the sign to crash with Izaya’s skull, and it was ire in Shizuo’s veins that made him fall to the ground with blood pooling from his head.  Shizuo shivers again at the thought.

“Ah, I just remembered,” Shinra suddenly says, wresting Shizuo from his memories too abruptly to even pull a moment of annoyance from him.  “Izaya asked me last night if I could bring him the classwork we did today.  So he must be at home.  Maybe his head is hurting him more than I thought it would…”

“Oh,” Shizuo says, half-heartedly.

When he gets home he’s met with everything he’s always welcomed with, his brother’s flat “welcome home” that still manages to tug a smile from Shizuo each time, his mother’s voice from somewhere in the back of the house, busy as she always is when he arrives, and the same from his father who never seems to be in a failing mood.

The evening is uneventful and quiet, something Shizuo always enjoys and looks forward to at the end of the day, but as he makes his way to his room after dinner, he catches a glimpse of his hands as he trails his touch along the railing of the stairs, and when he sees the absence of scabs or blood, pulls it closer to his face in near-panicked haste.

It’s true, there’s no sign of a fight anywhere on his hands, nothing even from the pull of the lamppost a day before, and it’s then that Shizuo realizes that he’s not had a single fight with anyone since he last injured Izaya.

\---

Realization hits him perfectly clear the next morning, when he happens to notice the faces—though still the same in fear and disgust with him as always—taking on a new tinge of terror that Shizuo’s never seen before.  It follows him all the way down the hall to his classroom, and even there it doesn’t stop; even there he can feel it weighing him down to the point of self-consciousness, a feeling he’s not at all accustomed to.

Though finally when lunch begins he manages to catch a break, eating his food around a corner on the roof where Shinra is talking with Kadota.  Neither of them looks at him any differently, and the fact of it manages to soothe Shizuo somewhat.

“Izaya did something, didn’t he,” he says around a mouthful of pork, the first he’s spoken during the break other than the conventional “hello” that came with his appearance to both of them.

“What do you mean?” Kadota asks.

“He’s done something,” Shizuo says again, vagueness pulling Kadota’s usual serene face into an angle of confusion.  “He started a rumor or something.  Had to have.”

“Oh, you mean how he told everyone that you killed someone the other day?” Shinra pipes up, voice titling over the edge of joyous mania, it seems.

Shizuo almost spits out his food.  “He _what_?”

“Oh, I thought you knew,” he says.  “That’s why no one’s been messing with you the last few days, I think.  They’ve become quite a bit more afraid of you, huh, Shizuo-kun!”  His eyes blink in amusement at the statement he makes, and with all of the strain and stress in Shizuo’s mind right now, he’s glad that he ends up leaning over and growling a warning at him.

“Right, right, sorry!”  His feigned apologetic look turns dark suddenly.  “But yes, Izaya made up a rumor when he came back that you killed someone.  He didn’t say it outright, but he hinted that it was a student.”

“Oh, yeah, I think I heard some of the teachers talking about it earlier,” Kadota appends to the conversation.  “They seemed really scared, but I didn’t know that it was supposed to be _you_ they were talking about.”

“It _shouldn’t_ be me,” Shizuo snarls, lunch forgotten for the ground to hold steady in the wake of his anger.  “I didn’t kill anyone.”

“I wouldn’t think so, but if the teachers get a name the school might do something about it,” he says, flat tone almost making Shizuo that much more angry at the situation.

“They _can’t_ , I didn’t _kill_ -“

“We know,” Shinra says, all the more darker than his eyes, more serious than Shizuo has ever heard it, even when Izaya was passed out and bleeding from a head wound in his hallway.  “ _They_ might not.”

The words do what Shizuo thinks they’re supposed to, shutting him up and straining his anger into more or less calm as they end up sitting in uncomfortable quiet under the weight of something so serious as murder, among the innocence of a high school rooftop.

But within moments he is back to annoyance, boiling quickly over to anger as he thinks of Izaya, spreading a rumor that could very well ruin his life without even the intention of harm.

“But _still_ , that bastard got his head bashed in by me and then he decides to go and make up a dumb rumor just to tick me off?” he growls, losing patience by the second.  “Like I said, was once not _enough_ for him?”

Shinra and Kadota don’t say anything, but for once Shizuo is relieved at the silence from his two friends; with nothing more to wind him up and nothing less to attempt to wind him to cool he’s free to sit and linger with the ire until the end of lunch, when still his own food sits on the pavement in front of his feet.

But even so, when he makes it to his room at night and remembers that Izaya didn’t appear for a second day, he can’t help but shiver at the thought of his blood seeping through to Shizuo’s skin, of the way his head titled helpless back under the pale of injury in Shizuo’s arms.

And when morning comes again, he is still awake and turning over the story of the rumor that could more or less be true at any point, without him even knowing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alrighty!! This chapter was actually pretty fun to write even if Izaya wasn't in it. It's fun to write Shinra and Kadota... THE NEXT CHAPTER THOUGH. That's when things really start to move along and I'm really really excited to post it soon! Hope you enjoyed :)


	5. Pliant in Step

The weekend is better for Shizuo; calmer and quieter and blank from any thoughts of Izaya or the events that happened before, and when he gets to school the next day he feels better than he’s felt in a while.

That is, until he sees Izaya.

Except when Shizuo spots him on the roof, locks eyes with him even, Izaya doesn’t move.  His gaze averts down, if still with his trademark smirk sliding out of view as he tips his head, and he ignores Shizuo almost completely.  For some reason it makes him stiffen, locks his muscles into physical protest at the lack of attention Izaya succeeds in giving him, and he doesn’t try to stop his next movements.

“ _I-za-ya-kun_ ,” he finds himself growling, the sound rich with the ire he’s nearly missed in the number of fights he’s not had in the last few days.  His feet carry him secure to where Izaya is sitting, staring down at a book with what looks like offhand focus if Shizuo didn’t know any better.

“Oh, Shizu-chan,” he says as Shizuo approaches all but fuming, his tone languid with indifference.  “I didn’t see you.”

“Don’t be an asshole, you looked right at me,” Shizuo gives, knuckles almost burning at the amount of pressure he’s using to curl his hands into fists.  “Where have you been, out spreading that rumor about me?”

Izaya feigns surprise, hurt.  “Rumor?” he lilts, voice higher than Shizuo has heard before.  “I wasn’t spreading a rumor; I was at home _resting_ because a _monster_ bashed my head in the other day.  It hurt.”  His mouth curls on disgust and gall of homogeneous parts, eyebrows down in defiant, unamused mirth.

“You asked for it,” Shizuo manages.  He hasn’t thought about the incident at all for the past day and a half, and even when he first saw Izaya the memory didn’t register.  But now he remembers well more than enough, and the words almost stick in his throat.

“Did I?”  Izaya looks confused for just a moment.  Shizuo has no doubt that it’s fake.  “I can’t remember.”  His smirk pulls wider and he closes his book and shuffles it to his side.  “I _did_ get a concussion, after all.”

Shizuo can tell that he’s being baited, but even for all the peace in the world, in this particular moment he can’t gather enough of anything to care.  He sees Izaya reaching for his pocket where presumably his knife is hidden, and in less than a minute Shizuo’s pulling the bench out from under him and swinging wildly as if it will ever be enough to catch up to him.  That is, discounting the last time.

“Oh, I see you’ve stopped your pretending to be human,” Izaya says almost joyously, all but chirping the words as he dodges out of the bench’s arc that Shizuo is giving to it.  “Good.  It didn’t suit you.”

“Shut the _hell_ up, Izaya!”  He swings again, harder this time, indignation bringing it in front of him and frustration giving him the upper hand as if he has ever had anything but; but Izaya continues to jump out of the way, his light-footedness back from where it fell some days ago along with the _ting_ that took away his only defense and the dripping of his blood onto the pavement under Shizuo’s feet.

“No attempt at building your vocabulary, either, I see.”  He hasn’t taken a swing with his own weapon yet, even though there’s no one else watching and Shizuo knows he wouldn’t be concerned with that in any case.  But he’s still himself, still not letting go of any of his defense mechanisms, and it’s at least _that_ that makes Shizuo believe he’s not dying or going to pass out again, even through his fit of rage.

“I’m going to kill you,” he growls, unthinking, as Izaya dodges yet another one of his attempted assaults.

“Are you?” Izaya tilts out of his way, sidestepping another swing of the bench.  “I guess you could, though, since you almost did _last time_.”

At this, Shizuo gives in to his increasing impatience and drops the bench, grabs Izaya by the collar and drags him to the edge of the roof where he hits the wire fence.  All of it happens within seconds, without much thought process as his muscles take over all of his controls, and when Shizuo finally focuses his vision to Izaya’s face again he expects some angle of shock or dizziness or _something_ to tell of his victory, but instead Izaya is still in his grip, muscles unlocked, smirk crooked and eyes lidded as he stares at Shizuo.

“Why don’t you?” Izaya says, the sound of his voice low and demanding and harsh.  “Do it now, get it over with.”  He’s still limp and unmoving under Shizuo’s fist in the neck of his shirt.

He considers it for less than a moment.  He could, he could do a number of things to achieve it—throw him over the wire fence just hard enough to make him go completely over the roof, strangle him within a number of unrestrained minutes, smash his head against the brick of the wall to his left—but then it’s here, as he’s thinking of the last one, that the feeling of Izaya’s blood sticking to his skin flashes sharply in his memory.  He thinks of all the blood that would come from the assault he just created in his head, and thinks of all the more that it would be than that of the wound he created last time, and all at once he drops Izaya back onto his feet and is stepping to the side to be sick.

He spends at least a good three minutes throwing up, he thinks, but Izaya doesn’t leave in that time, and Shizuo doesn’t really care.  He’s too busy thinking of all the warm red that he would seep into his skin if he were to kill Izaya like that, too busy thinking of how it would feel in that moment to finally, truly, be a monster.

When his stomach and thoughts finally settle enough for him to pull away from his hunched-over spot on the ground, he looks back towards Izaya, not exactly knowing what to expect, and speaks with a grate that sounds more like the wind in a storm than Shizuo’s actual voice.

“I-“  His voice fails him on the first try, his lungs momentarily forgetting how to breathe.  He takes a quick, shaky breath.  “I don’t want to fight you anymore.”

It’s an irrational thing to say under the stress of the moment, but he can feel his stomach still churning on the flickering image of all that blood, and his throat is burning under the weight of the acid sticking to the inside of his throat, and nothing else feels right to say.

He barely gets the words out, and he’s not looking at Izaya yet, but as he does, as he lifts his head to see what kind of taunt will come out of his mouth this time, he’s met with a look he’s never seen on anyone, let alone _Izaya_ , before.

He looks disturbed, in a way that speaks of some kind of odd sympathy, and he is tensing his shoulders as if he expects a fight, as if Shizuo’s last few words were all but a lie.  His whole face is drawing into a frown that is of much of that strange perturbed feeling as it is confusion, and his knife is limp in his hand hanging at his side.

He doesn’t say anything for a long time, long enough that Shizuo nearly grows accustomed to listening to the raggedness of his own breathing in the time it takes for him to speak again.

“OK,” he says, quiet and strange in his throat.  “I wasn’t the one to throw the first punch, anyway.”  He gathers a bit more of his usual self at the statement, throwing the hand up that holds his now-sheathed knife in a vague motion that says “whatever” and dragging half a smirk across his mouth.

Shizuo almost doesn’t say anything in his shock at the answer he is given.  But then Izaya takes a step as he re-adjusts his jacket and slips his knife back in his pocket, and as he looks like he’s starting to make a turn to leave, Shizuo speaks.

“So,” he starts, voice still rough with sickness.  “A truce or something?”

Izaya cocks his head a bit.  “I think that’s what they’re called, yes.”  Shizuo can’t gather any annoyance at it for all the nausea still surrounding him, and Izaya speaks his next line too quickly for him to do so even if he could.  “See you around, then, Shizu-chan.”  He waves his hand behind his head as he walks away to the entrance of the rooftop, leaving Shizuo to pick himself back up into any kind of controlled state that will allow him to walk home.

None of it matters that he just made precarious peace with someone who cannot be trusted, because as he steadies his footsteps and heads for the rooftop door himself, the sensation and the remembrance of Izaya’s blood eases into just a backdrop memory for the rest of the day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaay!!! Finally got to the chapter I was super excited to post!! After this I'm not entirely sure where it's gonna go but I've got a vague idea and I can't wait to write it. :)


	6. Relief to Be Breathed

Shizuo doesn’t see Izaya again until lunchtime the next day, when he is eating silently, listening half-way to Shinra rattle on about something Celty said last night.

He’s most certainly not looking for him, he thinks, but when the door opens for the fifth time during the span of his sitting on the roof, he looks over for his own fifth time and sees the black and red telltale sign of Izaya merely feet away from him.  At the presence, Shizuo instinctively and routinely stiffens, feeling the familiar flicker of annoyance that comes with Izaya being anywhere near him.

“Hello, Dotachin, Shinra,” he says as he approaches.  He looks unfazed by the event of what happened yesterday; he looks almost friendly to the three of them sitting there as he never has before.  Shizuo hasn’t taken his eyes off him, and watches carefully as his lazy smirk tugs wider as his gaze shifts his way.  “Hello, _Shizu-chan_.”

The name pulls anger from him, stronger more than the annoyance, but even through it he recognizes what the conditions are now, and he swallows his food and lands his bento on the ground with the smallest amount of force he can.  It still makes a sickeningly loud sound.

“Hello,” he manages to mumble.  In the periphery of his vision he can see Kadota’s eyes widen.

“Mind if I sit with you?” Izaya asks, shifting his weight as he crosses his legs over each other on the pavement next to Shizuo.  Shizuo looks towards where Shinra’s sitting, not really reaching for anything to focus his eyes on at all, and lets out an irritated growl as quietly as possible.

“Uh, sure,” Shinra says.  He sounds uncharacteristically confused and detached, but Shizuo supposes they’re all being pretty uncharacteristic at this point.

Izaya tilts his head up to the sky, his hands folding over neatly in his lap.  “It’s a shame that it’s not brighter out today; I could show you the head wound this beast gave me a few days ago, with only the best lighting of course.”  His voice drips with the kind of giddiness that whispers of his deliberate pose in trying to draw a fight from Shizuo.  He chooses to ignore it.

“You’re really trying to make small talk by talking about the _weather_?” he snarls, sounding as angry as ever, if with more restraint than usual.

“Hm?”  Izaya tips his head back down to meet Shizuo’s ire in his gaze.  “No, I thought maybe you might like to see the wound, too, Shizu-chan.  You are a master of damages, after all.  I thought maybe you could appreciate someone else’s handy-work.”

It takes all of Shizuo’s conscious effort to hold himself still in his shaking indignation.  “And you couldn’t think of a more subtle way to bring it up than to talk about the _lighting_?”

“Well, of course,” Izaya drones.  “Lighting is everything.  But I suppose a monster like you wouldn’t have time to think about silly things like that, would you?”

“Shut.  Up.  _I-za-ya-kun_.”

“Huh?  I can’t quite understand monster’s language, could you maybe speak up?”

It’s a taunt.  Shizuo knows this for a fact.  But in his attempting of holding back his ire from breaking through, the minimal succeeding he’s doing in it and his utter rejection to respond to Izaya’s talk about the wound or the “monster”, he can hear how childish and stupid the statement sounds.  It’s unpolished, like Izaya is running out of things to say, it’s a hackneyed insult and in his voice it sounds more petty and witless than anything, and in the face of the ridiculousness that he is sitting next to Izaya and not so much as flinching at his words, he can’t help but laugh.

It’s not as bright as it could be, with all the irritation still pressing down on his muscles being restrained from physical violence, but it’s a laugh nonetheless, sharp and a little more brittle than his usual ones.  He sees both Kadota and Izaya flinch at the sound, and watches as Shinra’s eyes widen impossibly large as all three stare at Shizuo, mouths agape.

“I guess you’re not always that great at insults, huh,” he finally manages through his harsh laughter.

He watches Izaya’s smirk disappear and turn into a frown of annoyance.  “What do you mean,” he says, empty of emotion.

“That last one sounded kinda stupid, don’t you think?”

“Uh,” Kadota gives.  “Can someone explain to me what’s going on?”

Before Shizuo can form anything to respond, Izaya is sighing to his right and hanging his head in his the corner of his eyes that are not focused on Kadota.

“I thought that Shizu-chan was a little more sensitive,” he laments.  “It’s too bad, I was itching for a little spar today, too.”

Shizuo growls, any amusement he was feeling dissipating in the wake of Izaya’s words.  “I _told_ you I wasn’t going to fight you anymore.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, waving his hand dangerously close to Shizuo’s face.  “It was worth a try, though.”  At the last few words his head lifts by a fraction and his eyes shift to Shizuo’s, his mouth curling on a smirk and his eyebrows bending into haughtiness or amusement, but Shizuo’s not sure which of them is stronger.

“Wait,” Shinra says.  His voice sounds fragile in confusion.  “You two aren’t going to fight anymore?”

It’s Shizuo’s turn to sigh.  “No, we’re not.”

“That’s great!” Shinra suddenly lilts, the sound jarring and frantic with joy.  Both Shizuo and Kadota jump in startled synchronization.  “I won’t have to stitch either of you up anymore, and you two can finally start to get along, just like I intended when I introduced you!”

Shizuo’s face burns with anger.  “I am _not_ going to be _friends_ with him!” he bellows, teeth grinding in a further attempt to keep himself still.

Izaya sighs again.  “That’s too bad, Shizu-chan.  I still thought we could have some fun together.”

Shinra’s smile is still as irritatingly bright as ever, Izaya’s taunt is as crisp as each time before, and Shizuo’s anger is a fiery as always.  But underneath all the heated irritation he can feel boiling along his skin, there’s a piece of him that sighs contentment in the peace and high school innocence that is consuming this moment for what it is.

Shizuo doesn’t think he’ll ever in his lifetime agree to anything more than a truce with Izaya, but for just these moments he lets the feeling linger that there is a chance of some kind of real peace with him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was a bit shorter than I wanted, sorry!! But if I made it longer it would be kind of a weird cutoff, so I decided to leave it like this. But the chapters after this are going to more like the usual length. It's getting kind of busy with school, but I'm really really enjoying writing this, so I hope to continue my scheduled updates!! :)  
> Edit: The next chapter will come out a day late (tomorrow, Saturday) because I ended up writing a whole new chapter in between this one and the original chapter 7. After that, though, I'm going to be back on the every three days schedule! Thank you for being patient, and hope you enjoy the next chapter tomorrow morning!


	7. Chasing Pity

Peace, in the first three weeks, is harder to attain than Shizuo thought it would be.

Izaya continues to appear at lunch, drawing irritation, if not ire, from Shizuo, attempting the game of cat-and-mouse that always seems to ensue with his presence.  Even with just his initial appearance, Shizuo can feel his cool wither and fade, edges pulling indirectly thin with the sound of Izaya’s voice.

“How terrible of me to think that a monster might understand language,” Izaya’s saying now, edging hazardously close to Shizuo next to him.  “Maybe you can get Shinra could teach you, Shizu-chan.”

“If I can’t understand language, how the hell am I supposed to understand that suggestion?” Shizuo growls in reply, the indignation on his tongue more apparent with every passing second.

“I suppose I was just trying to contribute to your learning,” Izaya lilts.  Shizuo meets his gaze, vexation straining his eyes.  Izaya gives him a wider smirk.  “Don’t you think that’s a nice thing to do?”

“You guys really are pushing it,” Kadota chimes in, earning Shizuo’s glaring contempt and Izaya’s half-curious furrow of his brows.  “At this rate you’re just going to go right back to fighting.”

“We are _not_ ,” Shizuo growls, voice unwavering even if the balling of his fists isn’t.  “If this _asshole_ could just shut up, maybe it would be easier.”

“So cruel, Shizu-chan,” Izaya tells him, sighing into long fortissimo, leaning back to give the weight of his torso over to his hands behind him.

Shizuo doesn’t even try to think up a reply.  At this point he sees the inevitable jolting up into his face in the form of red ire, and he has no desire to make it become physical force in this situation.

He doesn’t want to move, doesn’t want to unlock his muscles to gather up a fight, but he can’t deny that if Izaya were to pull out his knife and offer it as a precarious means of declaring war, Shizuo would grab for his neck without any hesitation.

“Hmm, I think they’re doing pretty well considering how they were before,” Shinra follows after Izaya’s comment.  “They _were_ trying to actively kill each other not that long ago.”

“I guess you’re right,” is all Kadota says.  He sounds dejected from the conversation, as if he has detached his very existence from the three of them and turned his attention to something of better use.  Shizuo doesn’t blame him.

But even at the assumption that Shizuo might break a protest at the conversation, or Izaya a snarky remark, both stay silent.  Shizuo thinks it’s because Izaya is thinking up a master plan to get him to finally break, but as the minutes pass without so much as a twist of movement from him, Shizuo drops the thought into paranoia instead.

Izaya seems off, seems odd and strained, as if the situation isn’t being pulled into the manipulation he wants it to be, and Shizuo almost snorts amusement at the thought.  If he’s feeling stupid, let him.

They leave without another word to each other.

\--- 

“Are you Heiwajima Shizuo?”

Shizuo is walking home when he hears the near-broken skid of syllables coming from behind him.  He turns his head on the premonition that it’s another gang member, despite the frail voice, but is met instead with a man no younger than his own grandfather.  He looks hapless, threat dissipating within a matter of seconds as Shizuo lays his gaze him.  He’s a good foot shorter than Shizuo, making the approach seemingly otherworldly as the old man near-stumbles his way towards him, a cane the color of a ramune bottle in his left hand.

It’s a strange sight, and Shizuo notes the way the cane shines oddly in the dipping sunlight, but nothing comes to mind that would alert him of any danger.  He just lets the old man come towards him, and allows his impatience to fall out and back into patience.

“I am,” Shizuo finally says when the old man is no less than a foot away from him.  “May I ask why?”

“A friend of yours asked me to give this to you,” the old man explains, holding out the cane for Shizuo’s taking.  Shizuo folds his eyebrows in confusion and looks from the object back to the man.  “He said that it was a late birthday gift.”

 _Birthday gift?_   Shizuo’s birthday hasn’t been for some time, and he can’t bring to mind anyone who might want to give him a present this late, through a stranger nonetheless.

_Except for…_

At the thought, Shizuo can feel his blood boil into anger.

_Izaya._

“That’s not a friend that gave that to you,” Shizuo manages to growl, still maintaining semi-polite speech.  “It’s probably full of poison or something.”

At the tone as much as the words, the old man blinks shock, lowering the cane back to the ground.  It makes an odd clanking sound against the pavement, as if it’s made out of metal instead of the glass it looks like.

“He told me that you were a friend,” he says.  “I didn’t realize that there was some kind of dispute.”

“There’s _not_ ,” Shizuo tries and fails to explain properly.  “I’ve _never_ been friends with him.”  His politeness is slipping and fraying at the edges.

Shizuo expects some kind of sad-pressed comment, a turn-away from the man, a dejected sigh and a final word about today’s youth, but under the ire over Izaya that Shizuo is feeling, he fails to notice the grin that is spreading across the old man’s face instead.

“Good thing I don’t care so much about that kind of thing,” is what he says before hitting Shizuo against the side of his head with the ramune-stained cane.

It makes Shizuo stumble, at the least.  But as he regains balance within moments, he lifts his head to see the kind of look this seemingly innocent old man in front of him is giving, and is met with a disgustingly familiar look that reminds him all too well of a certain bastard who he’s sure is behind this.

“ _Izaya-kun_ set you up to this?” Shizuo snarls, wresting the cane from his hands and slamming it into the pavement.  It makes an even worse sound than before, under the force.

He grabs the front of the man’s shirt and hoists him into the air, watching as the smirk he wore just moments before melts into the true fear that Shizuo’s so accustomed to seeing from strangers.

“Y-Yes,” the man gives him, in a hapless voice more true to his appearance than the haughtiness he was wearing on it before.

“ _And how much did he pay you_?”

“Fi-Five thousand yen.”  Terror is swallowing every part of his existence.

Shizuo snarls, a sound that makes the man jump under his hold, and throws him carelessly to the side.  He doesn’t look where he ends up, or _how_ he ends up, and instead continues walking down the street, hoping to get home without the anger gathered in him swelling to the point of seeking out Izaya for an unwanted fight.

But even with the roaring fury in his ears, he thinks he can hear Izaya’s laugh coming from where he left the man, and the sound, the _realization_ that Shizuo underestimated him at lunch, almost makes him stumble back into the cat-and-mouse game without another second thought.

 _Almost_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the extra day wait!! I realized that I wanted to add a chapter in between the last and the next, so I had to write it yesterday and wait until today to post it because of time and editing. Next chapter will be on the usual every-three-days thing. Hope you enjoyed! :)


	8. Timely Falls

Shizuo doesn’t know how it happens, but they quickly work up a routine that he thought that he would never come to enjoy.

Izaya succeeded a few times in his taunting since, but never got more than a much-deserved shock at the initial surprise of Shizuo’s fist flying towards his face.  Never once did he hit the bastard, though, and Shizuo’s grateful, even if his fists aren’t.

It’s almost the third month Shizuo’s had to endure it, and at this point he thinks he’s seen and heard every twist and turn Izaya has to offer, from his seemingly thought-out taunts that turn out to be, for the most part, only really effective when Shizuo is already riled up in the first place, to his childlike bickering that Shizuo has come to enjoy giving back to him almost as much as the physical fighting they once had.  And since he’s grown accustomed to Izaya’s presence, at least at lunch, he’s been able to stay calmer than he’s ever been around the taunting insect.

Today is no different, for either of them.  Or so he thinks as he walks up the steps to the roof.

When he gets to their customary spot near the corner of the expanse, Izaya is sitting by himself, reading some book with what looks like a bored expression, if Shizuo didn’t know any better.  He doesn’t look up as Shizuo approaches, but he does shift to the left on the bench he’s sitting at so that Shizuo has the option of sitting next to him.

Yeah, right.

“Where’s Shinra and Kadota?” he asks, lowering himself onto the pavement in front of Izaya and the bench, beginning to unwrap his lunch.

“Don’t know,” Izaya responds.  He looks up at Shizuo then, closing his book and shuffling it to his side with the same grace he had when he made the movement the day they made their truce.  “In the mood for a fight today, monster?”

“Nope,” Shizuo says around a mouthful of rice.  After all the times he’s heard the words and after being able to successfully hold steady against much worse in the last two months, Shizuo’s almost completely unaffected by the nickname or the bait.

He hears Izaya sigh above him.  “You’re no fun, Shizu-chan.”

“If you’re idea of fun is getting your head bashed against a stop sign and passing out then you’re worse of a masochist than I thought,” Shizuo growls.

“No,” Izaya sighs.  “I just thought that maybe the beast would have a time limit when it comes to truces.”

“Give it up, you’re not going to get me to fight you anymore.”  Shizuo meets his gaze then, eyes burning with the annoyance he’s holding in.  Izaya’s not smiling when he looks up, but as he meets his blood-stained eyes a smirk pulls minutely against his lips.

“It seemed to work a couple times before,” he says.

“Yeah, that was last month, though,” Shizuo says, dropping his gaze back to his food.

“Can monsters really change that easily in just a month?”

“Shut up, Izaya-kun.”  It sounds more exhausted than angry, Shizuo thinks.

Despite his dejection to any kind of cooperation, Izaya does as he’s told.  It’s strange and mildly disorienting for Shizuo, to have _Izaya_ of all people follow a command, and for just a moment a flash of panic jolts through him as he remembers how silent Izaya was when he got injured, when _Shizuo_ injured him.  He hasn’t thought about it a long time, not since he last had a real two-way fight with him, and at the abrupt thought he feels an anxious shiver run down his back.

But when he looks up to check, irrationally, that Izaya is still conscious, he’s looking down at his book with a frown on his face this time, and Shizuo involuntarily breathes a sigh of relief he can’t quite explain.  It’s a mistake, because Izaya lifts his head back to focus on him.

“What?” he asks.  He looks bored with just the tiniest edge of impatience.

“Nothing,” Shizuo tells him.  He frowns at the book.  “What are you reading?”

Izaya’s attention flickers for a moment to the pages in his hand and then he lifts his eyes back to Shizuo’s face, smirk back in check.  “It’s an English novel.”

“English?  Like, actually _in_ English?”

“Yeah,” Izaya says.

“I didn’t know you were that interested in English.”

“It’s important for me to know more than just Japanese in my line of work,” he drawls, smirk dragging wider.

“Your _line of work_?” Shizuo repeats back to him, eyebrows folding on confusion as much as suspicion.

“Informant,” Izaya tells him immediately.

Shizuo laughs more brightly than intended.  “Should’ve known.”

“If you don’t want to fight me, you could always be my bodyguard,” he appends.  “This kind of work is pretty dangerous.  I could use a crazy-strong beast like you to protect me.”

“You already asked me that,” Shizuo snarls.  “And I already told you I wasn’t going to work with you, bastard.”  Distantly, Shizuo registers how often he’s using the same insulting nickname.

Izaya’s face drops into a moment of confusion.  “When did I already ask you that?”

“Huh?  When you, er, when _I_ hit your head.”

“I never said that then.”  Izaya looks really confused now, like Shizuo’s never seen before, and as he says the words, Shizuo has a sudden affright of realization.

“You… don’t remember that?”  Shizuo’s memory is bringing him the blood on his skin again.  It’s been months since he’s felt it with this much crystalline clarity.

“No,” Izaya says, sharply.

Shizuo swallows, an idiosyncratic feeling of guilt washing over him as he realizes that Izaya really _doesn’t_ remember what happened then, that he _wasn’t_ lying when he said he couldn’t remember if he deserved it or not, even if it was mainly meant as a taunt.

 They fall into silence again as Shizuo’s chest beats under the weight of the remembrance of the event and the guilt that has started eating away at him.  Even with how long ago it was, it still feels like yesterday, still feels like at any moment Izaya will fall back into unconsciousness with his blood staining the ground under Shizuo’s feet.

Finally, under the long silence that stretches out along Shizuo’s perturbed guilt, Izaya speaks.

“Why didn’t you kill me?”

It’s quiet, almost as if he doesn’t want to be heard by anyone but himself, and devoid of the startled bite it had on it just minutes before.

“What are you talking about?” Shizuo chokes out.  He doesn’t realize how bad his voice sounds until it’s too late.

“I gave you a chance to,” Izaya lilts.  He’s back to smirking and offering the goading tang to his voice.  “And I suppose the time you knocked me out counts as the first chance, so that makes two chances when you could have finished me off.  Too scared, Shizu-chan?”

Shizuo just stares at him.  He doesn’t speak, doesn’t give up a growl that might tell of some irritation or ire or anything similar, but Izaya speaks again anyway.

“Why did you make a truce with me?” he bites.  “ _Pity_?”

At this, Shizuo finally finds the growl he was looking for.  “ _No_ , you stupid asshole.  I never _said_ I wanted to kill you.”

“Didn’t you?"

“ _No_.”

Truthfully, Shizuo doesn’t remember.  He can remember saying that he _would_ kill Izaya, but he can’t recall if he said he _wanted_ to or not.  But he decides to reject it anyway, at least verbally.

“Well then, I guess I really did fuck up my head if I’m making things up now,” Izaya gives back, the sound of his voice jarring and full of ire like Shizuo has never heard it before.  He doesn’t know why.  But there’s something in his sharp-brittle eyes that tells of Shizuo’s blame, and he blurts his next words unthinking.

“Sorry,” Shizuo huffs.  “I didn’t mean to hurt you that bad.”  It seems like a lame set of words of Shizuo’s vexation-bitten tongue, but he doesn’t try to make it sound any better.

Izaya gives him a beat of silence anyway.

“’That bad’?” he finally says.  He huffs a half-laugh himself, his expression backing up into a milder version of his mocking normalcy.  “Alright, then.”

Even with the acceptance of Shizuo’s half-hearted apology, he feels empty, like the guilt has finally reached his very soul and eaten into his very heart.

Because he knows that, before, he really _did_ mean to hurt Izaya that bad.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A bit of a time-skip!! I will be posting, once this ends, a few chapters of some of their encounters in between, though. I've finally gotten to posting the chapter I've been wanting to post for a while, too!! They both are sad as hell lmao. Hope you liked this chapter, and hope you're looking forward to the next one!


	9. Appended Expression

“What are Shinra and Kadota _doing_?” Shizuo asks as he approaches Izaya at lunch a couple days later, alone for the third time in a row.  “Did they just disappear off the face of the earth?”

Izaya shrugs.  “Don’t know,” he says, for a third time.  “Maybe they got tired of the monster who eats with them every day.”

Shizuo laughs bitterly.  “I think it’s more likely that they got tired of _you_.”

“How cruel, Shizu-chan,” he laments, a little like Shinra.

“Whatever, it’s not like it’s a secret that everyone hates your stupid ass.”

This time he takes the offering of the bench Izaya gives him, choosing to stay out of the way of the puddle on the ground in front of them.  It’s been raining all morning, and Shizuo has no desire to sit in dirtied rain water to further his irritation.

“That’s true,” Izaya agrees, leaning a little to Shizuo’s side to peer into his bento.  He snatches a piece of pickled greens as soon as Shizuo has the lid off, and Shizuo growls, grabbing his wrist as he connects the food with his mouth.

“Don’t steal my shit,” he hisses, letting go of his bone-skinny arm as he realizes that it’s too late to do anything anyway.  Izaya only grins malevolent at him.

“Don’t sit next to me, then,” Izaya suggests, the dots of his conceit tracing all along his voice.

“Stop the rain, then,” Shizuo snaps back, shifting so that he’s as far away from Izaya as he can be while still sitting on the bench.

“That was a stupid one.”

“Whatever, it didn’t have to be a good one.  It still got the point across, didn’t it?”

“And what was that exactly, how much you hate my guts?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Shizuo says, half-growling, half-sighing the word.

“That’s fair, I suppose.” Izaya sighs himself, tipping over the back of the bench so that his feet are off the ground.

“’Course it is,” Shizuo says, chewing around his own piece of pickled greens now.

They sit in relative quiet after this, Izaya still tipped back over the edge of the bench, staring up at the dark of the clouds, and Shizuo chewing through his lunch as he thinks about nothing particular, a rare treat he intends to savor while he can.

Finally when he is just finishing the last of his rice, Izaya tips back over the front of the bench and lands his feet back on the ground, and Shizuo’s peace is gone.

“Weren’t we supposed to go over to Shinra’s to watch that new movie?” he says suddenly, loud enough to almost startle Shizuo into choking on his food.

“Oh, yeah,” he says instead, pushing away the irritation that comes with the abruptness of the dissipated peace under the sound of Izaya’s voice.  “Not anymore, I guess.”

He doesn’t think either of them is going to add anything to the conversation for the rest of the lunch break.  It’s almost time to go back to their classes, and Izaya looks like he’s itching to leave the second that time arrives, and Shizuo, as he glances at Izaya, thinks he feels the same.

 _Thinks_.

“Want to do something after school?” he hears himself ask.  Izaya whips his head around at him quicker than Shizuo has ever seen him do anything.  It still doesn’t lack grace.  “Since we were going to be doing that, and we can’t now…”

Izaya’s are almost as wide as the time he almost passed out for a second time in front of Shizuo, and his lips are parted just a bit, as if he expected the same thing Shizuo did—silence until they were to leave.

For a long while Shizuo thinks he’s not going to answer at all, though to Shizuo this _long while_ is really only a few heartbeats of time, if his heart was beating at a normal pace.  But then Izaya blinks, and his mouth goes closed again, and he speaks.

“I have to go home to my sisters.”

Shizuo blinks himself into confusion.  “You have sisters?”  The statement sounds like a lie; Izaya could never care for anything but himself, could he?

“Twins, younger,” he says.  Nothing whispers of a lie or an excuse.

“Oh,” is all Shizuo gives back.  He doesn’t know what to say.  He’s never thought Izaya even _had_ a family, never really gave the idea a twitch of his brainpower.  The thought of Izaya with two younger siblings brings some kind of amusement to Shizuo, which he thinks is why he speaks his next few words of insanity.

“Can I meet them?”

Izaya blinks shock this time, pure horror of abruptness and confusion that makes Shizuo feel like leaving right on the spot.  But then he sees Izaya swallow, and his expression turns back to the well-familiar balance of the taunting lilt of amusement as much as haughtiness.

“Introduce my little sisters to the monster who almost killed me?”

“I didn’t mean-“

“Sure,” Izaya breaks him off.  “Why not?”

\--- 

Shizuo feels like everything’s fake, right in this moment.  It feels surreal, to be walking calmly next to Izaya, on the way to his house, to meet his sisters.

“It’s not far from here,” Izaya says, turning his head towards the stop sign in front of them.

He begins to speed up as they walk past it, and for just a moment Shizuo remembers the feeling of it in his hands, wresting it from the ground to swing in the direction of the very person he’s grown so accustomed to being around in the last few months.

When they get to the front door of Izaya’s house, Shizuo truthfully doesn’t know what to expect.  He half-expects normal children to greet them at the door, a normal mother and father working on dinner in a house that looks and feels as normal from the inside as it does from the outside.  But when Izaya unlocks the door and pushes it open, Shizuo’s met with absolutely none of it.

The first thing he notices when he walks in is how empty it feels.  Izaya’s parents must not be home, because there’s nothing in the kitchen, nothing in the living room, no movement at all.

“They must be in their room,” Izaya says, shaking his shoes off and dropping his schoolbag at the door.

As Shizuo is just beginning to do the same, Izaya is navigating up the stairs with unnecessary speed, as though a pair of 6-year-olds could really be doing anything so bad that would require such impatience.  But just as Shizuo is starting to climb up himself, he hears a squealing voice from somewhere above him.

“Iza-nii!” the voice chirps, loud enough for Shizuo to think that it’s _Shinra’s_ sibling instead of Izaya’s.

“What did I say about going through the kitchen before I get home?” Shizuo hears Izaya yell back, less anger than impatience lining his tone.

Shizuo thinks he hears another voice reply to him, but he can’t make out the words from his place on the stairs, so he climbs the rest of the way up and finds Izaya standing in the doorway of the farthest room to the left.  As he approaches he hears an overly-dramatic cry of protest from the voice he heard when he first began his journey up, and then Izaya, softer than he’s ever heard him.

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” he says as Shizuo approaches, sounding resolved and amused at the same time.  He glances behind him as Shizuo peers tentatively over his shoulder.  “Oh, right.  Mairu, Kururi, meet a real-life monster.”

“Huh?” Shizuo snaps, his gaze coming back from the two little girls sitting on a bed against the wall, to Izaya, a new kind of smirk pulling on his face.  He gestures out to make a show of Shizuo, and in the focus Izaya’s sisters give him, he can’t even drag an insult at him.

“A monster?” the louder one says.  “He doesn’t look like one!”

“Scary,” the second one appends.

“Trust me, he’s definitely a monster,” Izaya tells them.  “He can pull signs out of the ground with his bare hands.”

It sounds like he’s bragging, with the kind of attention in his tone that he’s giving it, and for just a moment Shizuo feels almost proud of the statement.

“That’s how I got that bump on my head,” is what Izaya says to make the feeling dissipate.

“Er, I didn’t mean to-“

“ _You’re_ the one who knocked out Iza-nii?” the loud one chirps.  Her eyes are big and wide staring at Shizuo.  “Cool, thanks!”

“Huh?” Shizuo says again, confused beyond anything he’s ever been confused about before.

“He deserved some kind of beating,” she says.  Her eyes go taut with joy, her whole being grinning at Shizuo like he’s just agreed to give her a pony for Christmas instead of the latter in this situation.

“Uh.”  Shizuo doesn’t know what to say, so he looks at Izaya, pleading for some kind of comment that could make him think of at least some minute of an insult.

But as Shizuo’s gaze drags over Izaya’s face, he goes extremely still, seeing the kind of expression Izaya’s giving the situation.

He looks like his same self, his eyebrows down in arrogance and mouth still taut with taunting malice, but his eyes are soft, and if Shizuo puts all of it together, it looks like a real smile.  It _is_ a real smile, he thinks, because Izaya doesn’t so much as protest the statement his sister gave with even a tiny feigned sigh, and when he looks up at Shizuo, his smile pulls wider with impossible speed.

Shizuo doesn’t know what to do with himself in the wake of the look Izaya has right now, but he does know that if this is the kind of rarity that’s going to come from spending time with him, he’ll put up with anything Izaya has to offer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> !!!!!!!!!!!!!! Honestly don't have words lol. This chapter was a lot of fun to write!! I really like the idea that Shizuo would realize that Izaya isn't all that and just be ... idk in awe or something. Anyway, hope you enjoyed!


	10. Unexpected Passing

“So your parents aren’t ever home?”  Shizuo is just beginning to stuff a handful of chips in his mouth as he asks, and when Izaya answers he can see the twitch of annoyance in his eyebrows as Shizuo crunches right over his words.

“It’s not that they’re _never_ here,” he says.  “They just don’t come around that often, is all.”

“Sounds lonely,” Shizuo says around another half-handful.

Izaya shrugs.  “Not really.  Fortunately, I have those two over there to keep me company.”  He jerks his head over to Mairu and Kururi, sprawled out across the floor with a box of crayons and too many pieces of paper to count.

Shizuo gives a half-laugh and Izaya flashes him a grin with only the tiniest hint of his usual taunting stance in return.  It’s been hours since Shizuo got here, but between the twins’ more-than-amusing remarks and Izaya’s offering of that smile every once in a while, Shizuo has had no real reason to leave, and hasn’t felt true anger—or even annoyance—since he walked through the door.

“You have a younger brother, don’t you?” Izaya asks, snatching his own handful of chips from the bag in Shizuo’s hand.

“Yeah, he’s in his second year of junior high,” Shizuo tells him.  “How’d you know?”

“Information broker,” he answers vaguely, smirk pulling near-conceit across his lips.

Shizuo frowns.  “Sounds illegal to me.”

“Not really,” is all Izaya says.

“ _Not really_?” Shizuo repeats, laughing over the syllables.  “Sounds even worse like that.”

“It’s not.  Besides, do I look like someone who would want to break the law?”  He raises his eyebrows, causing his smirk to seem almost off-center.

“Yes.”

“Cruelty!” Izaya laments.  “Mairu, Kururi, can you believe how _mean_ Shizu-chan is to me?”

His sisters look up at him for less than a second.

“Someone has to do it,” Mairu says, looking back down at her paper scribbled with what Shizuo thinks are red trees.

“Truthful,” Kururi follows.

Shizuo smiles at the absurdity of Izaya’s younger siblings, and as he turns his gaze back to Izaya and sees the feigned pout that has caught along the whole of his expression, his smile goes wider in amusement as much as a strange feeling of something like near-affection pulling at his chest.

He counts it as a reaction towards Izaya’s sisters.

“So, were you planning on going home tonight or were you thinking that you would just move in with us?” Izaya suddenly says, gaze fixed on the chips in his hand.

Shizuo can feel his face go warm with embarrassment, even as he attempts to deny it.  “ _No_ , what the hell, Izaya-kun.”

“It’s already ten o’clock,” he says, popping the chips into his mouth and tilting one of his eyebrows into feigned confusion.  “Don’t monsters know how to tell time?”

“Shut up,” Shizuo says, but there’s nothing in his voice that makes either of them think it’s intended to be anything but routine.  Shizuo stands then and brushes his pants of crumbs, and Izaya follows him, chewing through the last of his chips.

“Bye, Mairu-chan, Kururi-chan,” Shizuo says, adopting his own lilt at the strangeness of calling anyone associated so closely with Izaya “chan,” as much as with the amusement he feels towards the pair.  “See you later.”

“Bye bye, Shizu-nii!” Mairu chirps, Kururi following with a dip of her head and a quiet “bye bye” of her own.

Shizuo almost trips over his own feet at the sound of the nickname she gives him.  “ _Shizu-nii_?”

“Huh, she must like you more than I thought,” is all Izaya says.  “Lucky you, Shizu-chan.”  He gives Shizuo a bright-edged smile that almost looks fake, if Shizuo didn’t know any better.

All it does is make Shizuo less self-conscious over the new name he’s just donned, if not happier for it, if Izaya decides to look at him like this for it.

\--- 

“Shinra, Kadota,” Shizuo says as he approaches the routine spot at lunch, shock forming over his words as he’s met with the usual group that accompanies him to eat for the first time in three days.  “Where have you two been?”

“Shizuo-kun!” Shinra brightly says.  “We missed you too!”

“I never said that.”

“We were on a trip for our science class,” Shinra says, ignoring Shizuo’s comment completely.  “I told Kadota-kun to tell you, but he must have forgotten.”

“Ah, yeah, sorry about that,” Kadota chimes in, tipping his head down a fraction.  “I told someone else that we were going and I couldn’t remember if it was you I told or them.”

“What a terrible memory you have, Dotachin,” Izaya says.  Shizuo takes the offering of the bench again, well aware that it hasn’t rained since yesterday morning, and there’s nothing stopping him from taking a seat on the pavement next to Kadota.  “You would be a bad contestant for a game show.”

“Good thing I’m not going to be on a game show, then,” Kadota says, unwontedly snorting amusement.

“Yes, a very good thing,” Shinra appends.  “So what have you two been up to while we were gone?  Get into any fights?”

“Hm?  No, not that I’m aware of,” Izaya says.  Shizuo can hear the smart-ass remark under the tone well before he says his next words.  “Though, seeing as Shizu-chan seems to like to give me concussions, I’m not sure I would even know if we _did_ have a fight.”

“Oh shut up, Izaya-kun,” Shizuo growls around a bite of his lunch.  Izaya flashes him a grin taut with amusement as much as haughtiness, and Shizuo just rolls his eyes.

“Hm, there’s something different about both of you, though,” Shinra gives, in a suspicion-lined tone.

“Yeah,” Kadota agrees.  “They’re sitting on the same bench without trying to kill each other, too.”

Shizuo really does choke on his food this time.  His face goes red with what can, thankfully, easily be read as discomfort over the food in his throat, and he doesn’t even attempt speech as he coughs through embarrassment as much as minimal pain.  He doesn’t know why there’s any reaction to the comment at all, but he doesn’t try to parse it even as Izaya speaks.

“I’m hurt, truly, that you’ve forgotten us so much already that you find our behavior so odd,” he half-laments, leaning over the back of the bench and kicking his heels off the pavement.  “Maybe Shizu-chan and I will just find some other, more _attentive_ friends.”

“No, you two are definitely acting different,” Shinra insists.

Shizuo can’t even look up from his lunch.

“Again,” Izaya sighs.  “I just think we need _better friends_ , is all.”

“What’s this _we_ crap?” Shizuo manages to say finally.  His voice sounds rough and almost angry.  He doesn’t feel like it.

“Do I need to replace _you_ , too, Shizu-chan?” Izaya lilts.  “How sad, even Shizu-chan is being a terrible friend!”

It sounds off-hand, normal, like the two of them have been friends since childhood, and it wouldn’t be hard for a passerby to believe it with all the amusement and near-joy that’s spreading across Izaya’s face in this moment.  But Shizuo’s _not_ a passerby, and he can feel the jolt of shock as much as some odd happiness at the idea that Orihara Izaya, of all people, thinks of him as a friend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh shit I totally forgot that I hadn't posted this chapter yet!! Because of that chapter I added in the middle, I still thought that chapter 9 was this, so !!!!!! Anyway yeah this was super fun to write and Izaya's sisters are always entertaining. Especially when they start calling Shizuo Shizu-nii. Hope you enjoyed!


	11. Unmentioned in Secret

Shizuo is starting to think that Izaya’s taunting lilt of calling Shizuo a friend was less of a taunt and more of a truth.

He wasn’t incredibly sure that it was truthful in any light at first, but in the last week he’s begun to believe it more and more.

“Where to today, Shizu-chan?” Izaya is lilting now, skipping down the sidewalk that leads to Izaya’s house, where they usually end up spending the afternoon.

“What do you mean?” Shizuo says, frowning.  “Aren’t your sisters at home?”

“They are,” Izaya says shortly, slowing his pace so he can walk next to Shizuo.  “But they’re not going to be causing any trouble today.  My parents are back in town for a couple of days.”

“Oh.  Shouldn’t you be home with them, then?”  Shizuo watches Izaya’s smirk fall flat.  “I mean, uh, since you don’t get to see them that often.”

“No,” is all Izaya replies with, bright haughtiness playing across his face once more.  “They’re busy.”

Shizuo doesn’t press him for any other information.  The lilt has stopped and melted into something more fragile and taut with an emotion Shizuo couldn’t pinpoint even if he tried, and he doesn’t feel like he should mention it.

“Then where are we gonna go?” he says instead.

Izaya looks at him with a tilt to his head.  “That’s what I asked you.  Is the monster starting to learn language, finally?”

“Don’t start with that shit,” Shizuo growls.

“Why, don’t you miss our fights?”

“ _No_.”

“I thought you would.”

“I don’t.”

“You shou-“

“I _don’t_.”  Shizuo catches Izaya’s wrist in his hand and pulls him to a halt, growling the reply inches from his face.  He can see Izaya’s mouth pull on a victorious smirk.  Shizuo groans in defeat and throws Izaya’s hand out of his grip.  “You’re an asshole.”

“Cruelty gets you nowhere, Shizu-chan!” he gives, his voice skipping along with his feet as he mismatches his pace again from Shizuo’s.  “So where to?”

“I don’t know,” Shizuo sighs.  “My house?”

He can see the calamity that might come with taking up the offer with perfect clarity, but Shizuo isn’t nearly as afraid as he would be if it were months earlier, at the thought of Izaya being in his home.

“Sure,” is all Izaya says, and lets Shizuo take the lead to his house.

They end up going in the complete opposite direction of where they were pointed, and Shizuo hears more than enough complaints from Izaya about the distance and the inconvenience that comes with making their way to Shizuo’s home, but all of them go quiet when they finally make it to the front door.

“ _Finally_ ,” Izaya laments.

Well, almost all of them.

“I’m home,” Shizuo yells into the house as he pushes the door open, Izaya trotting inside behind him.

“Welcome home!” he hears his mother call back from somewhere upstairs.

Shizuo hastily takes his shoes off in the doorway to make room for Izaya, watching as his smirk turns strange and taut as he dips his head to take his own shoes off.

“What’s your problem?” Shizuo says, harsher than intended.

“Hm?” Izaya says, looking up at him just as he’s finishing getting his second shoe off.  His face still clings to the strange almost-embarrassed look from moments before.  “Nothing, what’s wrong with _you_ , Shizu-chan?”

“Nothing,” Shizuo scoffs.  He turns his back to him and begins to make his way upstairs, careful not to run into his mother in the hallway.

“Oh, Shizuo, did you bring a friend?” she says, as her gaze catches at Izaya following behind him.  “Introduce me!”

Shizuo jumps at the appended command, and turns to look at Izaya with near-hot cheeks.

“Uh, this is Orihara Izaya-kun,” he mumbles, dragging a hand across the air to make a vague gesture towards Izaya, stopped half-way up the staircase.  Shizuo catches just a moment of his strained expression.

“Nice to meet you, Orihara-kun!” his mother says, smiling warmth at him.  “I’ve never met one of Shizuo’s friends before!”

Shizuo’s face goes hotter and he ends up turning his gaze to the ground.

“Nice to meet you, Heiwajima-san,” Izaya says, the drawling lilt of his voice unwavering, even if his look from before wasn’t.  “I’m hurt Shizu-chan hasn’t mentioned me before.”

Shizuo doesn’t even want to see the kind of expression Izaya’s begun to offer with the words.

“’Shizu-chan’?” his mother repeats back, confusion drawing along the edges of the nickname.  “I didn’t know you two were so close, I’m as surprised as you are that I haven’t heard about you.”

“He just calls me that to make me angry,” Shizuo cuts in, before Izaya has a chance to say anything worse.

“Oh?”  She turns her head back to Shizuo and tilts her head, smiling.  “You’re not stopping him, though?”

He hears Izaya’s muffled laugh behind him and groans, pushing his way to his room without another look back.  Maybe bringing Izaya here _will_ still bring the chaos he might fear before, after all.

“Your mother seemed so surprised that you had a friend at all, Shizu-chan,” Izaya says as Shizuo closes the door behind him to his room.  “Has the monster never had any friends before?”

Shizuo knows he’s just teasing, not even really taunting this time, but somehow it hurts worse than any other comment Izaya has ever given him, stabbing a kind of pain Shizuo never thought possible without physical assault.  Without giving him a reply, Shizuo sits at the edge of his bed and sets his schoolbag down, head tipped down to watch the slow movement with focus that’s not intended and not needed at all.

“What?” Izaya asks.  He takes his own seat at Shizuo’s desk.

Shizuo doesn’t reply.  Hurt is coursing through his veins wider and softer than any anger he has felt before, and he doesn’t have any words to give, can’t find them even if he tries.

“Shizu-chan?” Izaya says this time, voice taking on a softer tone than before.  “Don’t tell me you-“

“No,” Shizuo finally says.  “I haven’t really had any friends before.”

“Huh?” Izaya’s eyebrows furrow down in near-irritation-bitten surprise.  “I was joking.  What about Shinra and Dotachin?”

“Yeah, I guess, but they’re not very-“ _close_.  Shizuo stops himself before he says it, feeling the oddity of the implication on his tongue before he lets it free.  Instead, he lets his head tip back down again from its former attention on Izaya, setting his mouth into self-deprecation hard and strong.  “No one really wants to be friends with a guy who can pull stop signs out of the ground and beat them with it when he gets even the slightest bit angry.”

“What does that make me, then?” Izaya says, almost too quickly.  “A masochist?”

“What?”  Shizuo lifts his head to look at Izaya, as soft-strained shock tugs at his formerly-sad appearance.

“You said no one wants to be friends with someone like that,” Izaya repeats for him.  “Does that make me weird?”

Shizuo can’t breathe.  It’s sudden, should be alarming, should cause him to panic and attempt to find help to make his lungs start working again, but with the implication and unrealized-fact that Izaya’s just conjured up with his words, he can’t find even the slightest tang of worry over the lack of air being pulled into his lungs.

Izaya’s just staring at him, his face completely blank save for what looks like determination in his mouth and near-sternness in his eyes.  He doesn’t say anything else, just waits for Shizuo to find his way of breathing again, so that some kind of reply can be formed without making him look like a bigger fool than usual.

When he finally finds a breath again, Shizuo doesn’t use it for what he initially thinks he should.

“I guess,” is what he says, breathing the words into a laugh.  He smiles then, over the absurdity and the happiness balancing against his chest, his mouth pulling crooked in a type of smile he hasn’t used very often and isn’t sure looks all that great, but he doesn’t try to hold it back.

Izaya looks so serious that Shizuo thinks that he might even get angry at the expression Shizuo gives him, but then he watches his gaze flicker down to the crookedness of his smile, and as his own mouth twitches at the corner and his expression breaks into something so strange and soft that Shizuo feels as though everything is happening in slow motion.

Izaya’s smiling, unrestrained and even wider and brighter than when he first saw it at Izaya’s own house, and his eyebrows raise instead of furrow and he opens his mouth to laugh in echo of Shizuo’s own.

He doesn’t know what kind of insanity is taking him over for him to think what he does, but _he’s pretty like this_ is what pops into his head, and no amount of taunting, he thinks, will get him to forget it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hahahahaha I have no idea what to say!! I hope you enjoyed this chapter as much as I enjoyed writing it!


	12. Capitulating Midnight

Shizuo doesn’t even notice how much time passes while Izaya’s at his house.  They’ve been playing a word game for over two hours now, and before that they attempted to stay completely silent while they did their homework, a bet that was won by Izaya when Shizuo snapped to stop staring at him while he was trying to work.

“Tiger,” Izaya says now, leaning back against Shizuo’s desk chair to stare at the ceiling.

“Tilt,” Shizuo gives back, trying to resist the urge to laugh at how stupid Izaya looks in that position.

“Tear.”  Izaya shifts in his seat, his voice dropping to what sounds like boredom.  “Let’s play something else, Shizu-chan.”

“Huh?” Shizuo says, just as _trap_ is at the edge of falling from his tongue.  “You’re the one who wanted to go through the whole alphabet.  We’re only at T.”

“I know, but there’s too many words to go through,” Izaya laments, kicking his feet up on Shizuo’s desk.  He had feared that Izaya would do that when he first sat down, but forgot about it after so many hours of it not occurring.

“Get your feet off my table,” he growls now, reaching over from his spot on the floor to push at Izaya’s legs.

“Why?” Izaya says, smirking malevolence at him.  “What do I look like to you, an insect?”

“Yeah,” Shizuo growls.

“What insect?”

“What?”  Shizuo pauses his half-hearted shoving at Izaya’s ankle to look up quizzically.

“You said I looked like an insect to you,” Izaya repeats.  “What kind of insect am I?”

“I don’t know,” Shizuo tells him, frowning.  “A flea?”

Izaya offers a burst of laughter.  “A _flea_?  Why a _flea_?”

“I don’t know,” Shizuo says again, irritation pouring over the words.  “Your hair is black and fleas look black.”  Shizuo pauses for a moment before appending, “And you’re annoying as hell.”

“Hm,” Izaya gives.  “I suppose.”  His smirk turns soft in the middle and he looks down at his feet, making Shizuo’s gaze follow, a move he thinks is more to distract himself from Izaya’s smile than anything else.

“I thought I told you to get your feet down,” he tries again, reaching once more to push against Izaya’s feet.  He doesn’t use any more strength than he did before, and Izaya barely even moves.  “ _Flea_ ,” he appends, snarling the word just enough to let Izaya know that he’s being about as serious as his shove is.

“Who said you could start calling me that?” Izaya chuckles, lifting his right foot to stop on top of Shizuo’s hand and hold it there with minimal pressure.

“Who said you could start calling me ‘Shizu-chan’?” Shizuo returns, allowing Izaya’s foot to sit atop his hand.  He intends the sentence to be growled, but it goes soft and thin under the movement Izaya makes.

“And here I thought you liked that nickname,” he says, adding just the tiniest sigh.  “In all honestly, though, it wasn’t me who came up with it.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was an old classmate of yours, a girl, who told me about you and used that name.  ‘Cause of that nickname, I thought you were a girl.”

Shizuo coughs.  “You thought I was a _girl_?”

“I’d never seen you before, give me a break, Shizu-chan,” Izaya laughs, the edge of it real and bright.  “It’s not like I couldn’t tell I was wrong the second I saw you destroying that soccer field.”

“Whatever,” Shizuo growls, turning away from another one of Izaya’s smiles.  He intends to say something else after, but Izaya laughs again and Shizuo can’t find words to give under the pressure of the sound.

They end up downstairs when they realize how late it is, and Shizuo’s mother insists that Izaya stay and eat before he leaves, and all-too-quickly Shizuo finds himself sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with Izaya at the dining table, not quite enough room to fit comfortably spaced-out.

“Your little sisters are _twins_?” Shizuo’s mother is saying, as Izaya chews through some of his meal and Shizuo swallows down a smile at the sight of his cheeks so puffed up.

“Yes,” Izaya answers.  “They’re quite the troublemakers, so it’s nice to have a break from them tonight.”

“I’m sure!” she says.  “But I’m sure your parents have it even worse, huh?”

It’s an innocent enough comment, light-hearted and meant to draw amusement from everyone at the table, but Shizuo watches Izaya’s expression drop for mere moments into what looks like hurt and follow closely with a lilting high of feigned laughter.

“Yes, they sure do,” is all Izaya says, with the same sound he always has on his voice, with no trace of that expression anywhere, had Shizuo not known it was there just seconds before.

They finish eating without anything more to draw that expression back to Izaya, but Shizuo can see it along the lines of his features, and can hear it even when he’s laughing about Kasuka’s confession he got the other day, and Shizuo isn’t sure what to do about it until they get to the front door, just as Izaya’s about to leave.

“Are you alright?” he asks, forcing his voice to sound as off-hand as possible.  It doesn’t work.

“What do you mean, Shizu-chan?” Izaya says, lilting over the syllables more than necessary as his head comes up from tying his shoes.  “You asked me that the last time I was doing something with my shoes.  Do I really look that bad?”

“No,” Shizuo tells him, concern forming harder as he sees Izaya’s feigned smirk.  “Since dinner you’ve been acting kind of funny.”

“Acting funny?” Izaya repeats, head tilting as he keeps his lazy expression.  “Did I hit my head again?”

“ _No_ ,” Shizuo says again, clenching his fists at his side, more under the irritation of not being able to find the right words than at Izaya’s annoyance.  “You look like something happened, like you’re hurt.”

Izaya really looks confused now, smirk dropping and head canting back to where it belongs.  “What?”

“I don’t know, like someone said something wrong or-“  And then it hits him: the way Izaya reacted to the comment about his parents on the way home, the look he gave when Shizuo’s _mom_ answered him when they walked in the door, the hurt that plastered across his features for just a moment when his mother brought up the actions of _his parents_.  “You…”

“I…?” Izaya drawls, head tilting to the side once more.

“Do you want to come over tomorrow?” Shizuo blurts, instead of the obvious epiphany that is running through his mind.

“Why’s that?” Izaya asks him, tilting his head back center again.  “Your family doesn’t need to feed me every day, you know.”  At the last part, Shizuo can hear it go bitter on his tongue, and even if it does make Shizuo flinch, it only furthers his realization and makes him reinforce what he said.

“Because I want you to.”  Izaya’s eyes widen and Shizuo feels his face go hot.  He tries to open his mouth to speak again, maybe to revise the statement into something better, but finds his tongue blank of words for at least the fifth time tonight.

“OK,” Izaya tells him instead, quietly, as he reaches for the handle of the front door.

Shizuo realizes at the last second what he’s doing and scrambles to open it for him, bumping his shoulder against Izaya’s.  His face burns hotter and he opens the door carefully, letting the cool of the air be a comfort to his cheeks.  He can see Izaya glance at him as he steps outside, and hears the tiniest huff of laughter, and when Shizuo looks up to see his face, he catches Izaya’s shoulders instead, shaking on what Shizuo thinks is minimal held-back laughter.

He doesn’t _think_ Izaya noticed how red his face was, but when he closes the door and the cool air slips away from him, his face goes hotter around the realization of how red it must really be to make Izaya laugh like that from just a glance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone wondered why the infamous nickname hasn't been present, this is why! I, in all honestly, think that the nickname may have come about when they first met (canon) but as far as I know there's no evidence of when it did, and seeing as I'm pretty far from canon at this point, here's my version lol. Also I swear there's a plot beyond this, there's just a few chapters in between before I finally get to that (I'm thinking around chapter 19 is when I'll introduce that part of the plot, but it may be earlier depending on how things go). Hope you enjoyed!


	13. Wandering in Expression

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is especially dedicated to spectrum, who always leaves incredible comments and who once mentioned that they might like to see a chapter with something like this! Hope you like it! :D

The first time it happens, it’s when they’re on their way back to Shizuo’s house.

Izaya initially spotted the dog tied to a post outside a convenience store, and had Shizuo turned his head, too, to follow Izaya’s gaze.  Shizuo, being a fan of dogs, found his way to the post, patting the dog on the head and smiling at it as it licked his palm and wagged its tail too quickly to be with anything other than joy.

Shizuo had expected Izaya to follow, maybe even to pet the dog as well, as strange as the idea sounded, but he only stood where he was, on the complete opposite side of the street, as still as Shizuo had ever seen him.  He hadn’t thought much of it, and when Shizuo had jogged back to him, smile still intact, Izaya had complained and given a taunt and Shizuo had forgotten about it completely.

But now they’re on their way to Izaya’s house, and as they’re turning a corner, a group of three dogs finds their way toward them, and Izaya _yelps_ at the startle of it, and ends up stepping behind Shizuo as he kneels down to pet them.

“ _Shizuo_ ,” he hisses, drawing Shizuo’s attention away from the dogs at the use of his full name.  He thinks it’s the first time he’s heard it from Izaya’s mouth.

“What?” Shizuo says, keeping his hand on one of the dogs’ heads as he cranes his neck to look up at Izaya behind him.  It’s then that he notices how close he’s standing, and how stiff he is.

“Let’s _go_ ,” Izaya tells him, through gritted teeth.  His voice is strained and high.  “My sisters are probably setting the house on fire right now.”

“No they’re not,” Shizuo says, frowning as he stands and keeps his hands by his waist to allow the dogs to sniff.  “What’s wrong with you, anyway?”

“ _Nothing_ ,” Izaya says, but then one of the dogs ends up at his feet, and Izaya jumps and turns around to press his back against Shizuo’s.

“Hey!  What are you-“  Shizuo steps away from Izaya, startled, and turns to see his face plastered with fear.  He’s never seen him like this, and instead of bringing panic, it just brings amusement.  “Are you _afraid_ of them?”

“ _No_ ,” Izaya growls immediately, taking a tentative step away from the dog and back to Shizuo.  “I hang around _you_ , Shizu-chan, do you think I would be afraid of a few dogs?”

Another dog responds to Izaya’s snapping and turns to make its way to him, and Shizuo chuckles as he watches him jump at the contact of the dog’s nose against his shoe.

“What’s so funny?” Izaya asks, frowning fear and ire to bite through to Shizuo.  It succeeds, but not in the way Izaya might want it to.

“You’re fine, they’re just dogs, flea,” Shizuo says, amusement lighting up his voice as he wraps his hand around Izaya’s wrist.  Izaya flinches at the contact, but it’s minimal compared to the startle he had toward the dogs.

“They’re _unpredictable_ ,” Izaya says back, and Shizuo can’t stop his laugh that jumps through at the face Izaya gives him.  It reminds him of a child, and he can’t deny that it’s cute.

“And what am I?” Shizuo asks, instead of voicing the appreciation of Izaya’s behavior.  Izaya doesn’t say anything, just glares at him, and Shizuo laughs again and tugs at his wrist.  “Let’s go, then.”

Izaya follows almost too quickly, near-stumbling over his own feet as he rushes to get away from the following dogs.  Shizuo ends up having to shoo them away, and Izaya doesn’t begin to relax until he does so.  His hand doesn’t loosen its grip around Izaya’s wrist, but Izaya doesn’t say anything, even as Shizuo watches his shoulders sag and hears his breathing even out, and neither make a move to pull away from each other until they get to the front door.

“I didn’t know you were afraid of dogs,” Shizuo says when they’re comfortably sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on the floor, backs against the edge of the couch, watching as Mairu and Kururi attempt to carry in large bags of snacks from the kitchen.

“I’m _not_ ,” Izaya snaps, angry like Shizuo has never seen when it comes to something as trivial as this.

“You were literally _jumping_ because you were so scared, I-“

“Shut _up_ , Shizu-chan, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” Izaya cuts in, voice grating ire but the red of his face bleeding embarrassment for Shizuo’s eyes to gaze.

Instead of snapping back that he very much _does_ know what he’s talking about—that he was there, that he saw how afraid he was— Shizuo laughs, bright and wide like Shizuo himself has never heard before.  It makes Izaya flinch in the periphery of his view, but not in a way that makes him think it’s anything to do with fear.  Izaya doesn’t say anything, but when Shizuo turns to finally look at him straight-on, he pulls his mouth into a crooked smile, and Izaya’s gaze flickers down to see it, his own expression twists soft, and he smiles reluctantly, dipping his head down and away from Shizuo’s view.

\--- 

It’s the next day that Shizuo has an idea over the subject.

He’s eating lunch with the usual group, and is watching as Izaya flashes half-true smiles and amusement-lit glances toward Shizuo, when he thinks of it.

But even so, he doesn’t act on the idea until after school, when they’re on their way back to Izaya’s house in a silence that is both unusual and strangely comfortable in its own way.  He sees Izaya deliberately start to turn down the street farther up from the one that held the dogs from the day before, one that will lead to a much longer walk and a chance to see the dipping sunlight before they make it to his house.

But just as Izaya is angling his foot to start down the street, Shizuo stops him, grabbing his wrist and wresting his movement from going any further.

“What are you doing?” Izaya asks, narrowing his eyes.

“I want to stop by the convenience store and get this new drink,” Shizuo lies, pulling gently on Izaya’s wrist so that he’s facing the correct street.  “Plus that route is too long.”

Izaya frowns and tugs his wrist away, starting on his way back to the street with the dogs.  “It really isn’t, but if you insist on being difficult, I suppose I can amuse you for a while.”  His eyes slip closed for a moment and his mouth flickers on a smirk that is part-amusement and part what Shizuo thinks he recognizes as nervousness.

As they turn around the corner and onto the street, Shizuo half-expects his idea to fail.  He half-thinks that the dogs will be gone, that there will be nothing to show of his efforts besides a overly-sweet drink that he didn’t really even want in the first place.  But then he sees them, one less than yesterday, rushing toward them with joy that he thought was impossible for anything or anyone.  In his periphery he sees Izaya flinch and slow his pace, until he is tentatively walking more or less behind Shizuo.  It makes Shizuo grin, unbeknownst to Izaya.

As he’s reaching out to pet one of the dogs, grin stuck to his expression like glue, he hears Izaya make a sound of protest, and turns his head to look up at him.

“I thought you said you weren’t afraid of dogs,” he half-growls, grin turning haughty as he sees Izaya’s precarious-lined expression edging closer to irritation.  “It wouldn’t be fitting if you were, seeing that you’re a flea and all.”

“I’m not afraid of them,” Izaya says, teeth clenching hard against each other.  “I told you before.”

“Well, I can’t tell that you’re telling the truth by how you’re acting right now,” Shizuo gives back, turning his head back to the dogs sniffing his shoes.

Izaya groans and shoots back, “I don’t have to _prove_ anything to a monster like you” with almost no real bite, for all the strain in his voice.  Shizuo just turns his head back and raises his eyebrows, and Izaya hangs his head and sighs.  “I hate you.”

Shizuo gives his smirk back over to smiling as Izaya takes a tentative move to crouch beside him, flinching hard against Shizuo’s shoulder as one of the dogs turns its attention toward him and shoves his nose against Izaya’s hand.  Shizuo turns his own attention away from the dog in front of him and completely over to Izaya’s reaction, and watches with a grin as Izaya’s expression tenses and fills with a kind of uneasiness he’s never seen from him before.

“They’re just dogs,” Shizuo says, his voice low.

“Are you trying to _comfort_ me?” Izaya hisses, with another half-flinch at the return contact of the dog’s nose against his skin.

“Maybe,” is all Shizuo says in response, pressing his shoulder heavier against Izaya’s.  “I’m just saying, they’re not going to do anything worse than get slobber all over you.”

“How reassuring,” Izaya drawls, but Shizuo can see his shoulders loosen as much as he feels it, and watches his face drop into more or less relief as they stay crouched on the pavement in front of the dogs, with nothing more to show of the encounter than the minimal hair clinging to their clothes.

Even as they walk away, Izaya’s expression still clings to the reassured softness it had when they were crouched shoulder-to-shoulder, and any fear of anger toward what Shizuo did dissipates as quickly as it forms when he sees Izaya flash a tentative grin at him as he takes the lead to his house.

Maybe he’s more human than Shizuo thought.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I loved loved loved writing this chapter! It originally was really difficult, a lot more so than I thought it would be. I had been planning to put in a chapter or a scene concerning Izaya's fear of dogs, but when I got to it, for a while I really didn't know what to do with it. But I'm glad that I got here eventually! Also, side note: if anyone gets the pun in the title, I commend you because I would have made it in italics if I could have, and I thought it was kind of funny lol (hint: it's in "wandering"). Also, another side note: if you see anywhere in here that it says "convenient store" instead of "convenience store" it's because I'm a fool and sometimes my English is terrible lol. Anyway, hope you enjoyed!


	14. Reoccurring Demise

“Have you been to America?” Shizuo asks, watching with a smile across his face as the twins drag pieces of colored paper across the floor from their bedroom.

“No,” Izaya replies, the word more or less purred for all the rumble he’s giving the sound.  “I’ve never been outside of Japan.”

“Oh,” Shizuo says.  “Are you _going_ to go to America?”

“At some point I would like to, yes.”  Izaya looks up at him with mischief in his eyes and Shizuo frowns on premonition.  “Don’t worry, Shizu-chan, you can come too.”

Shizuo’s eyes widen, the sound in his throat comes out as “Why would I want to go with you?” as he growls annoyance that is barely there and whips his head the other way to hide the red on his cheeks, trying not to focus on the bright-edged laugh that leaves Izaya’s throat.

It’s not until Mairu chirps something unintelligible that he dares to look back, and is rewarded with the amusing scene of Kururi on the floor and Mairu being pulled along as well.  Izaya sighs beside him and stands to help them, and it’s here, when both the twins are on their feet and steady, that Shizuo’s night is twisted.

“Was that just like the time you got knocked out, Iza-nii?” Mairu near-yells.

Shizuo goes completely still at the mention.

“Huh?” Izaya composes from his throat.  “No way, that wasn’t anything like it.”

“Will you show us, then?” she appends, eyes lighting up in a way they most definitely shouldn’t, considering the subject at hand.

“What do you mean ‘show you’?” Izaya chuckles, walking back over to the spot on the floor where he and Shizuo had placed themselves when they walked in.

“Show us what it was like, just pretend!”

Izaya rolls his eyes and huffs.  “Why would you want to see something like that?”

“Hatred,” Kururi says, in the same quiet voice as always.

“Exactly!” Mairu appends.

Izaya laughs again and cuts his gaze to Shizuo.  “What do you think?"

_What do I think?_   He isn’t breathing, so he isn’t sure.  Shizuo has to push the thought away of Izaya’s smile turning sour before dropping completely away from his face, when his hair was doused with his own blood, before he can even think of responding to him.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” is what he says instead of what he is thinking, finding a lungful of air to use for the words.  He thinks his face must tell the whole story, but he thinks that must not Izaya care, as he continues to talk.

“Come on, Shizu-chan, it would be fun,” he says, smile tugging bright enough that Shizuo can imagine it falling flat and into pain at just a glance.

“No,” Shizuo manages, more or less stumbling up off the floor.  He doesn’t dare look at his shirt, even though he’s incredibly certain that there’s no blood to find there.  “I’m not going to-“

“Pretty please, Shizu-nii!” Mairu laments, tugging on his pants to stop his movement as he shifts to get away from the commotion, as if it were anyone else Shizuo wouldn’t just keep walking.  “Just this once!”

“No, Mairu-chan, I don’t like violence,” Shizuo attempts, knowing that with the wobble in his voice, it sounds more like an excuse than anything.

He gently pulls away then, and makes his way down the hall to the bathroom, stomach queasy already from the memories conjured up with even the thought of _violence_ and _Izaya_ in the same idea.

There was a time when Shizuo might laugh bitterly at what he feels now, but he can’t save even a flicker of halting to think of it clearly, and doesn’t notice the sound of Izaya’s footsteps behind him until he’s stumbling to grab a hold to the sink.

“What’s the matter?” Izaya asks, his voice quiet and steady.  Shizuo blinks hard at the remembrance of that voice shaking on what he knows now must have been pain.

“Nothing,” Shizuo says.  “I’m fine, just-“  And a sudden wave of sickness rolls over him, and he groans and sinks to the floor, pressing his head against his arms still stretched above him to hold to the sink, as if just this one thing can keep him from pressing any further into the self-deprecation he feels.

“Shizuo,” Izaya blurts, falling to the floor alongside him, knees pressed gracefully into the tile.  “ _What’s wrong_?”

Shizuo shakes his head, the movement causing it to spin even when the motion is done, and he huffs a breath against his arms, feeling himself begin to tremble under the stress.  Izaya’s here, practically touching him for how close he is, but there’s still the feeling of blood on his skin and the image of his own strength causing the gash on the back of Izaya’s head, and he can’t seem to let the panic wash away even with the truth right in front of him.

“You’re shaking, Shizuo, what’s wrong?”  Shizuo’s never heard him say anything so seriously in all his life, and if it were any other time he would stop and make a comment about it, maybe attempt to shake the tone from Izaya into something softer, but he can’t think straight and can’t conjure up anything to say that would be worth the attention that Izaya is giving him.

“ _Shizuo_ ,” Izaya tries again, and Shizuo feels a hand settle on his shoulder.  Shizuo flinches, but doesn’t dare move.

“I can’t-“ Shizuo starts, before he feels another wave of nausea rush over him and he begins to distrust his mouth to be open without being sick.  “I don’t want to fight you,” is all he can think of to say when he regains enough confidence to open his mouth again, even though he knows the reality of the moment, and he knows what the response will be.

“Huh?  We’re not fighting, we don’t have to fight,” Izaya tells him, words rushing over themselves until Shizuo nearly feels dizzy just from the sound of it.  “They were just being stupid and insistent and I was just trying to play along.”  Shizuo takes a shaky breath to calm himself, but then Izaya appends something that makes him forget everything he’s feeling in the moment for as long as the words hold in the air.  “I didn’t know it would make you like this.”

It shouldn’t be a surprise, because Shizuo hasn’t been thinking of Izaya’s motives for the entirety of the night, and wasn’t thinking about why Izaya insisted on amusing the twins in the least, but the words make Shizuo sag into what he thinks is exhaustion, in what is probably more like happiness, because never in his life has he thought that Izaya would want to see Shizuo in any other situation than suffering.

“We don’t have to fight,” Izaya repeats, firm enough that it snaps Shizuo back from his thoughts.

He takes another shaky breath, feeling the sickness in his veins stir and begin to settle back into idleness, with the sound of Izaya’s voice hard on confidence, if tentative and unsure in its step.  He lifts his head to turn it to giving attention to Izaya, and drops his hands from their grip at the sink.  Izaya is looking at him with what Shizuo thinks is concern, if it weren’t for all the harshness in his gaze.

But just when Shizuo thinks his expression will stay hard forever, his face softens and he loosens his grip on Shizuo’s shoulder as soon as he notices Shizuo looking at him, tilting his head and smiling what he thinks is reassurance at him.

“Why would I want to fight a protozoan like you, anyway?”

Shizuo takes a moment to fully process the words, but when he does, he huffs a laugh then, because he thinks he should still take offence to the comment, but he can hear the deliberate usage of the nickname that doesn’t start with “m” and can’t see anything more than that dagger-piercing smile that would mean anger and annoyance, if it were anyone other than Shizuo.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In... all honesty I don't think I executed this chapter very well, or at least as well as I wanted. I really wanted to use this idea I had, though... Anyway, I hope you liked it regardless of what I think of it lol!


	15. Dissipating Horror

It takes a while for Shizuo to stop thinking about it.

Izaya shoos his sisters to the main part of the living room and leads Shizuo up to his own room, and he doesn’t think he’ll see or hear from the twins for the rest of the night.

He supposes it’s Izaya’s way of apologizing.

“Are you OK?” Izaya asks once he’s closed the door behind him, watching with a frown as Shizuo takes a seat at Izaya’s desk.  It reminds Shizuo of when they made their truce.

“Yeah,” Shizuo replies, his voice gruffer than he thought it would be.  He clears his throat to repeat it, but Izaya talks over him.

“It wasn’t that bad of an injury, why are you so stuck on it?” he says suddenly, voice back to the seriousness Shizuo doesn’t think he likes all that much, coming from Izaya.

“It _was_ bad, Izaya,” he growls in response, trying to fit his voice and manner back to normal.  “And the reason I’m so _stuck on it_ is because I had to carry you all the way back to Shinra’s with your head bleeding all over me.”

“What, couldn’t stand the sight of a _flea’s_ blood?” he attempts to tease, huffing a laugh over the words.  Shizuo shoots him a glare.  “I’m not hurt anymore, Shizu-chan, you don’t have to think of it so terribly.”

“But it _was_ ,” Shizuo insists.  “You don’t even remember what happened.  What if I caused long-term damage to your memory or something?”

“You didn’t,” Izaya tells him.  “You’re just feeling sorry for yourself no-“

“I’m _not_ ,” Shizuo snarls over Izaya’s lilt.  “Whenever I think about it all I can think about is _you_ going unconscious, _you_ bleeding all over my shirt, _your_ smile going-“  And he stops himself, his face bleeding red all over again.  “I don’t care about me, I just don’t want you to-”  Shizuo doesn’t think he would be able to finish the sentence even if he forced himself.

After a long beat of silence, Izaya pipes up with, “Hmm, I suppose I can believe that.”

Shizuo glares up at him.

“But you never thought like that before,” he appends, lilting sickly sweet over the statement.  “What changed, Shizu-chan?”

Shizuo thinks he shouldn’t answer, that it’s a trap somehow, but Izaya is looking at him with determination and the lightest smile possible and no malevolence to be found anywhere, and Shizuo says the best thing he can in the matter.

“I thought you were all asshole and nothing else.”  Izaya raises his eyebrows.  “But I was wrong, huh?”  At the appended, Shizuo cuts his eyes to Izaya’s own, and flashes him a tentative crooked smile.

Izaya returns it with a flicker of happiness coming from lips of his own.  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that if I were you.”

“I think I’ll be fine,” Shizuo huffs, attempting to stretch out against the space to finally relax after the previous ordeal.  He hears Izaya sigh something that would sound dejected if it weren’t for the smile Shizuo knows is still on his lips.

“So what now?” Izaya says, coming around to sit on his bed next to the desk.  “Since you’re not gonna amuse us by throwing up or pretending to hit me with a stop sign.”

“Whatever,” Shizuo growls, kicking his feet up on Izaya’s desk.  “I’m not the one who has insane sisters.”

“How cruel, Shizu-chan,” he drawls, shifting to kick his own feet on the desk from his place on the bed.  “Verbally abusing my sisters.  I should kick you out.”

“But you won’t,” Shizuo says, allowing Izaya to kick his feet atop of his own.

Izaya sighs again.  “You’re right, I’m just too horribly _lonely_ without you here.”

It’s most definitely supposed to be a joke, from the context and the lilt Izaya gives the words.  But Shizuo can hear it turn over into quiet sincerity, and when he turns his head to look at Izaya, he’s got his own head turned the other way, staring down at the ground with a lazy smirk that’s falling more than it’s holding.

“Want to go to a festival?” Shizuo blurts.  He doesn’t know of any happening in Ikebukuro right now and doesn’t know if he will be able to find any, but in the moment he says it, he couldn’t care less.

Izaya looks up at him then, eyes wide and mouth agape, expression wiped completely clean of any attempt at off-handedness.

“A festival?” he echoes, as if he’s never heard the word before.

“Y-Yeah,” Shizuo stammers, looking up at the ceiling to hide his cheeks from view.  “I’m sure we could find one.”

He hears Izaya give a tiny laugh.  “You don’t even have one in mind, you just were asking if I wanted to go in general?”

“No, I was asking if you wanted to go with _me_ ,” Shizuo clarifies, realizing too late what the statement sounds like.  His cheeks burn.

“Oh,” is all Izaya says.  Shizuo can hear the slight wobble to it.  “I guess so, if we can find one, that is.”

Shizuo breathes a sigh of what he thinks is relief, and looks back down to Izaya’s feet atop his own.  “I’ll ask around.”

“Alright,” Izaya lilts, higher than Shizuo thinks was intended.  “But I’m not wearing anything special.”

“Huh?” Shizuo coughs, cheeks turning red all over again.  “Why would you?  It’s not summer.”

“I know, but I didn’t want you to think you would get to see me in anything special.”  Izaya flashes a grin at him and turns his head back to the side in what Shizuo thinks is pretended focus on the opposite wall, so that the entirety of his face is hidden from view.

“Don’t be a brat,” Shizuo says, instead of voicing the obvious falsity to Izaya’s attention.  Izaya just chuckles softly.

Shizuo doesn’t think he should parse much out of the comment other than the obvious _he’s being an asshole_ , but somehow his brain paints it into _he’s flirting_ , and for the rest of the night all Shizuo can do is try to find it again in everything else Izaya says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry that this chapter was a little short, I just wanted to include this little moment by itself as a part of the story. I really like the idea that Shizuo would find himself asking to do something with Izaya or inviting him to something without really thinking it through. Anyway, hope you enjoyed!


	16. Sympathy Instead

Shizuo can’t deny that he’s on edge.

It’s lunchtime, and he’s sitting in the same spot he always does, eating the same lunch he’s had for nearly three days now, with the same people he’s always with.

Well,  _almost_.

“Are you alright, Shizuo-kun?” Shizuo hears Shinra’s bright-touched voice call toward him from the pavement.  Shizuo looks up from his food and watches Shinra’s face drop from nervous happiness into frowning worry, and has a pang of realization that he’s frowning himself.  “You’re quieter than usual, today.”

“Hm,” is all Shizuo gives for Shinra to parse.  He sees Kadota in the corner of his eye shift to get a better look at Shizuo’s face, and quickly ducks his head back down to his food in search of privacy that will not come.  “Izaya’s not here.”

“Oh,” Shinra says, voice lighting up as if epiphany has clawed its way into his throat.  “He’s probably out causing trouble, I’m sure he’ll be back soon.”

“No, he hasn’t been here all day,” Shizuo clarifies, some form of annoyance and frustration and  _worry_ , he thinks, lining his tone.  “He’s always here.”

“Maybe he’s just sick,” Kadota suggests, shrugging in Shizuo’s periphery.  “Not everyone is immune to everything like you seem to be.”

The thought hadn’t even crossed Shizuo’s mind, that Izaya could be  _sick_ , that he could even  _get_  sick.  But once it’s suggested, he can’t get it out of his head—that Izaya is at home, alone and miserable—while Shizuo is here, eating lunch with friends and very much  _not_  miserable.  Or so he tells himself.

When classes have ended and Shizuo’s done his share of cleanup, he practically races out of the school, huffing breaths as he makes his way toward Izaya’s house.  It seems strange, that just months ago Shizuo might have laughed at the suggestion of Izaya being sick, laughed at the idea that Izaya was miserable somewhere, and now he’s racing to his house to fix what, before, he may have even tried to make worse.

He reaches Izaya’s house in almost no time, stepping gingerly up the front steps to the door while attempting to get his breathing back to normal from his run here.  When he knocks against the light-colored wood in order to announce his arrival, he half-expects one of his sisters to answer the door, for the image Shizuo has painted in his head of Izaya, terribly sick, and unable to even get out of bed.

But then he hears a stumble on the other side, too loud to be one of the twins, and then the door comes open, and Shizuo is met with Izaya himself, eyes pulling wide and mouth going agape as he takes in who it is at the door.

“What are you doing here?” he manages, voice odd and strained, as if he’s trying to keep himself away from sleep.

“I thought you might be sick,” Shizuo says, taking in the sight of him.  At a glance, Shizuo  _could_  be right.  Izaya’s more or less hunched over, hair a mess and eyes heavy, but the angle and the way he’s holding himself is all wrong, like he’s not in any pain at all, like he just needs to sit down for a minute to catch his breath.  “Are you OK?”

“Yes,” Izaya answers immediately, stepping aside so that Shizuo can come in.  “Just because I decided to skip school doesn’t mean I’m sick.”

“You don’t look that great,” Shizuo appends, quickly taking off his shoes and moving to follow Izaya up to his room.  The twins wave to him and call his name, but he only saves a tiny smile and a return wave for them before turning his attention back to Izaya.

“I’m fine, Shizu-chan,” he says.  “Just tired, is all.  I was up late doing some research.”

“Research?” Shizuo repeats, closing the door behind him as Izaya falls on his bed to lean against the wall.

“I’m an informant, remember?” he attempts to lilt, tugging a smile across his lips for a moment before it falls back into what Shizuo thinks is discomfort.

“That kinda sounds like bullshit.”

“It’s not,” Izaya sighs, tipping his head back against the wall and letting his eyes slip closed.  Shizuo thinks he must have something else to say, a teasing comment or an attempt to get Shizuo to growl something in annoyance, but Izaya doesn’t say anything, just keeps his head back and eyes closed, until Shizuo can see the clear outline of sleep pressing against him.

“Have you not slept all day?” he asks, jerking Izaya from his daze.  His head comes up and away from the wall and his eyes blink rapidly open, brows furrowing down into a frown.

“No, I’ve been busy,” Izaya tells him, suspicion harsh against his tone.  “Why do you care?”

“Because,” Shizuo starts, and doesn’t finish.  Izaya’s eyebrows raise in question, but Shizuo only feels his face burn, and he looks away fast to stare at the ground.  “You look tired.”

“I am,” Izaya admits, giving another sigh.  “I told you, I was up all ni-“

“It looks like you’ve been up for more than just a night.”

Izaya tips his head back up to glare at Shizuo, but under the pressure of worry that’s rushing his words, Shizuo couldn’t care less.  There’s another long span of silence, long enough that Shizuo thinks he should maybe just drop the subject altogether and find something else to talk about, but then Izaya takes a breath, and tips his head back down, and speaks.

“I haven’t been sleeping well.”

Shizuo can feel all the warmth in his veins sharpen into ice at the statement.

“What?” he asks stupidly, feeling strange inside his own body.  He’s not sure why, but the idea of Izaya not being able to sleep wrests him from stability, and twists his heart into sympathy that is as sharp as the words from Izaya sound.  “Why?”

Izaya sighs again.  “I don’t know.”

“So,” Shizuo starts.  “You weren’t up researching?”

“No,” Izaya says, quietly, after a moment.  “But it was a good lie, huh?  If I’d only used it right.”  His voice lilts into a moment of amusement, an attempt at a tease, and Shizuo hurts worse, thinking that all of his true energy has been stripped away from him because of this.

“Is it because of your sisters?” Shizuo asks, feeling and hearing his voice crack precariously in his throat.

“No, nothing like that,” Izaya says.  “But it’s true that this house is sometimes the cause of it,” he appends, huffing a laugh in a teasing spirit.

“What do you mean?”

“Hm?  I don’t know, it’s hard to sleep sometimes.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“So demanding,” Izaya chuckles.  “I just get bored with it, I guess you could say.”

Shizuo hums, not quite understanding, but Izaya goes quiet again and turns his head to look at the movement he’s making with his hand to toy with the edge of his blanket, and Shizuo finds himself enjoying the sight enough to gather brightness up back into his voice.

“If you’re so bored sleeping here, you could always sleep at my house.”

Izaya’s never looked so shocked in his life, Shizuo thinks.  But even in the wake of Izaya’s fragile expression and the suggestion he’s just made, Shizuo’s cheeks don’t color red; his face stays cool, and he doesn’t think twice about giving Izaya a lop-sided smile.

Izaya’s own mouth twitches amusement at the sight, as Shizuo knew it would, and softens his next words considerably.  “Why would I want to do that?  What about my sisters?”

“They could come too,” Shizuo says, keeping his expression light and his smile intact.  “My mom’s always wanted to take care of girls anyway.”

“How germane, Shizu-chan,” he drawls, or tires, as the edges pull and drag to something closer to pain to match with the blatantly-drained appearance he has, before lifting again into half-amusement.  “I guess I might take you up on that, assuming you’ll be able to handle the twins.”

“Yeah,” is all Shizuo says, huffing a laugh and tipping his weight so that he can lift his feet up on Izaya’s desk and keep his head tilted to continue to watch him.

Izaya’s never been one to agree to anything very easily, but Shizuo thinks that if he’s able to get Izaya to agree so off-handedly to so many little things, on top of this, he’s got to be at least a little bit different from everyone else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poor Izaya!!! It's funny because I honestly used to think that Izaya was the worst character because of how much of an asshole he is, but in all honesty I think he's the best and most well-thought-out characters of the series. He's an incredibly interesting character, as well, which makes him really fun to write. Unfortunately I kind of have writer's block right now, so hopefully by Monday I'll be able to finish and edit the next chapter without hating it lol... Anyway, hope you enjoyed!


	17. Strange Mentioning

It’s been raining for days now, and usually Shizuo would have a problem with this, would spend the days growling annoyance at having to come home from school with soaking-wet clothes in the result of fights outdoors, but he’s had hardly any fights lately and there’s someone who’s with him more often than not that whispers of serenity and sanity in a way that Shizuo never thought was possible.

But at the current moment in time, Shizuo feels neither of these comforts.

Izaya hadn’t shown up at their makeshift lunch spot near the back of Shinra’s classroom, and even when Shizuo had gone to Izaya’s own classroom, and to the vending machine Izaya likes to buy from sometimes, and the corners of the school that Izaya usually liked to hide from Shizuo during fights, he can’t find him anywhere.

It’s enough to bring unease—if not panic—from him, and when he finally thinks to look up on the roof where they usually sit, he doesn’t notice that he’s out of breath.

Rain is pattering down more heavily than it was in the morning, and Shizuo isn’t one who enjoys getting wet, so it takes him more than a few moments to finally cave and make his way through the rain to search their usual spot.  It turns out to be worthwhile.

Shizuo spots him immediately as he goes to turn the corner, as Izaya himself is looking back behind his shoulder and walking the way Shizuo is coming from.

“Hey, flea!” Shizuo near-shouts, even with the tiniest of distances between them.  Izaya jumps and whips his head around.

“Shizu-chan?”  Shizuo isn’t sure when the nickname started sounding truly affectionate.  “Wha-“

“What are you doing out here?” Shizuo bites, growling over the words.  Izaya is soaking wet, hair all but glued to his head and uniform dripping water, along with the rain, onto the pavement.  It makes Shizuo’s unease spike again.

“I was just enjoying the rain,” Izaya gives, a lilt tilting his statement over into a playfulness Shizuo is sure he isn’t able to feel for all the distress weighting his appearance.

“Bullshit,” Shizuo growls, grabbing Izaya’s arm and pulling him back towards the entrance to the roof.  He realizes how unnecessarily angry he sounds, as if ire is clouding his words and actions more than the concern that it is, but Izaya is still feigning a smirk and Shizuo doesn’t think he would even be able to attempt a better sound in his throat for the expression.

“So harsh, Shizu-chan,” he hears Izaya say behind him.  “In a bad mood because of the weather?  You have always hated the rain, haven’t you?”

“No,” Shizuo gives him as they make it to the door.  He wrests it open and shoves Izaya inside.  “Flea-“

“I happen to like the rain, beast,” Izaya huffs, frowning to match the miserable sight he currently is.  “I was enjoying myself until you showed up.”

“Izaya-“

“Just because you’re not having a good day doesn’t mean you should ruin other people’s fun, huh, Shizu-chan?  It’s funny, I thought you might even like the sight of me in-“

“ _Izaya_!”  Izaya’s never gone so quiet before.  “What were you _doing_ out there?  What’s the _matter_?”

It takes a minute for Izaya to get his expression back under control from the shock stretched across his features before.  “I don’t know what you mean,” Izaya tells him stubbornly.  His voice sounds shaky, and Shizuo doesn’t fall for it.

“You’re soaking wet and you’re very obviously faking your usual chipper demeanor,” Shizuo says, attempting a calmer tone now that the immediate panic has ebbed along with the feeling of the rain on his skin.

“I’m not,” Izaya chuckles.  “Like I said, just because _you’re_ in a bad mood, Shizu-“

“I’m not in a bad mood,” Shizuo gives in a tiny growl.  “You were standing out in _pouring rain_.”

“And that bothers you, why?”

Shizuo doesn’t exactly know, but doesn’t stop to think of anything to say before he opens his mouth and starts speaking.

“You could’ve gotten _sick_ , Izaya,” is what he ends up giving, in a louder-than-expected tone.

Izaya goes dead silent again, eyes widening and mouth coming open on what Shizuo thinks could be a gasp, though he’s not sure why.

“There’s _obviously_ something wrong,” Shizuo says again, more harshly this time, as the worry spreads faster over his skin.  “You don’t just stand out in the rain for nothing.”

“That’s stupid logic,” Izaya manages to mutter.

“It’s not,” Shizuo insists, stepping closer to Izaya as his shoulders slump.  “There _is_ something wrong.”

“There’s not,” Izaya lilts, taking a step back of his own.  The shocked expression he gave moments before has been replaced with his normal façade, as his eyes go closed and his lips lift up in a feigned smirk of conceit.  “It kind of seems like there’s something wrong with _you_.”

“There’s _not_ ,” Shizuo growls, following Izaya as he makes his way downstairs, backwards.  “Why won’t you tell me?”

“Tell you what?” Izaya says, turning around so that his back is facing Shizuo as he continues down the steps.  “I could tell you about what I’m going to do once I get downstairs.”

“You’re eating with me,” Shizuo automatically responds.  It takes him a moment to resurface.  “ _No_ , I meant, why won’t you tell me what’s wrong?”

Izaya sighs.  “Ah, you caught me.”  Shizuo quirks his eyebrows when Izaya turns his head around to smirk up at him.  “The vending machine I buy from hasn’t had my favorite drink in a whole week.”

“Izaya-“ Shizuo snarls.

“Oh, come on, Shizu-chan!” he laughs.  It sounds fake ringing in Shizuo’s ears.  “Take a joke, come buy a drink with me.”

Reluctant, Shizuo obliges, following Izaya in silence to the vending machine.  Shizuo can still see the rain clinging to his skin, and can’t shake the feeling that something really is wrong.

“It’s not commensurate,” Izaya drawls suddenly, pulling the straw of his drink free from his mouth as he tears the plastic sleeve away from it as well.  “It’s not a typhoon, it’s just rain.”

“What?”

“You seemed really worried about the rain,” Izaya says, and shrugs.

“I’m not,” Shizuo insists again.  “I’m worried about _you_.”

At the appended, Shizuo feels himself flinch, watching as Izaya’s eyes blow wide for a third time today, this time with more shock involved.  The straw in his mouth tugs free of his drink and out of his mouth, dropping onto the floor in a single clumsy moment.  Shizuo’s face flares with heat, and then, as Izaya quickly ducks his head to the floor, Shizuo catches the tiniest glimpse of what he thinks is a blush on Izaya’s own face.

“Do you have to make things so difficult,” he hears Izaya mutter after a while of silence, as he bends down to pick up the straw and throw it in a nearby trash can.

“Huh?”

“Nothing,” he clarifies, or tries, as his head comes up and his voice rises with it, but the blush is still clinging to his face, and Shizuo can’t help but grin at the sight, causing Izaya to flush red rather than the pink it was, and whip his head around the other way.  “Let’s go eat lunch already.”

Shizuo’s sure there’s still something bothering him, but when they get to the doorway of Shinra’s classroom and Shizuo nudges his shoulder against Izaya’s and gives him the tiniest of lopsided smiles, Izaya smiles back, and for the rest of lunch seems at ease, even _with_ the rain covering his clothes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello hello!! I didn't think I would get to the main part of the plot so early, but here I am. I realize it doesn't really look like there's any plot happening but there is, I promise lol. Without giving anything away, I hope you enjoy the chapters following this one!


	18. Slip and Pass

“Hey you, you’re Heiwajima Shizuo, aren’t ya?”  The brackish voice echoes slowly from the distance between Shizuo and the thugs, but the words and initiation are clear without having to even parse them past the first of their speech.  “You think you’re that tough, do ya?”

“Hm?” Izaya begins to lilt before Shizuo can growl his ire at the challenge.  They’re on their way to Shizuo’s house, and the sky is still clinging, as it was the day before, to its threat of rain that Shizuo thought had expired weeks ago.  It doesn’t make the situation feel any more comforting.  “What’s this, a challenge of violence?  How predictable of small-time thugs like you!”

At the sound of Izaya’s playful, near-bored tone directed at the men in front of them, Shizuo can feel the fire of his ire begin to cool, to the point of mere annoyance more than anything.

“’Scuse me?!” one of the thugs exclaims, balling his fists together completely incorrectly, thumb underneath his other fingers.  The relative calm Shizuo has makes him notice it, and brings out a huff of a laugh.  “What are you laughing at, huh?”

“Oh, I’m impressed that you have some modicum of manners,” Izaya drawls, stealing a glance Shizuo’s way as he laughs.  Shizuo can see in the corner of his eye Izaya’s own smirk pull real for just a moment.  “Now the real question is if you really expect that you can intimidate Ikebukuro’s fortissimo with that kind of talk.”

“What are you babbling about?” another one shouts.  “And who the hell are you?”

“Me?”  Izaya feigns surprise.  It makes Shizuo smile despite the situation.  “I’m Ikebukuro’s _informant_ , of course.  Orihara Izaya, pleasure to meet you.”

“Never heard of you, _Orihara_ ,” the thug says, taunting lilt adopting itself into his throat at the end.  It makes Shizuo’s amusement fall, his annoyance rise to anger.

“Shut up already,” he snarls, balling his own fists, the correct way, and stalking his way toward the trio of low-life men.  “I hear enough taunting bullshit from that asshole over there.  I definitely don’t need to hear it coming from your mouth in the form of _his_ name, either.”

“How cruel, Shizu-chan!” Izaya calls to the back of Shizuo’s shoulders, just as the thug in the middle of the three is hissing, “Oh yeah, ya think you can take us on, punk?”

“I do,” Shizuo responds as curtly as he can with the growl he’s giving it, before his fist collides with the thug’s jaw.  He flies off to the side instantly, and by the time Shizuo is turning to give the same treatment to his companions, Izaya is there, slicing through one of their shirts to the skin underneath, with movement so graceful Shizuo wants to believe it’s fake.

The thug sliced open screams, falling to the ground with such _little_ grace it starkly contrasts with Izaya’s abundance of the trait, and makes Shizuo feel a rush of pride at the realization that the latter is his friend.  So much so that when he goes to punch through the final thug’s jaw, he hits harder than intended, and leaves a bruise against his knuckles.

“That was fun, Shizu-chan,” Izaya says as he falls into step with Shizuo on their track back to his house.

“It wasn’t,” Shizuo tries to growl, but ends up merely grumbling in the wake of Izaya’s bright-edged smile.  “I don’t get why everyone’s starting to pick fights again, though.  For a long time I wasn’t getting into any at all.”  He steals a glance at his blood-stained, purple-brushed knuckles and frowns.

But instead of continuing to look at the track of violence coloring on his hands, he looks back to Izaya, hoping to find relief in his expression, but flinches when he sees the newly-raised look Izaya is giving him now.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” Izaya answers immediately.  His frown jumps back into conceit-lined happiness, though this time looks more strained than before.  “I guess this year the idiots have decided that winter hibernation is to be switched with spring hibernation instead.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” Izaya repeats, with a huff of a laugh.  “An attempt at a joke to make the beast smile.”  At the appended, Izaya’s expression lifts just that much more, feigning weight dissipating, as he flashes Shizuo the lightest smile he’s ever seen.  It does what Shizuo thinks it’s supposed to do, because within moments he’s smiling himself, lopsided in a new way that he doesn’t try to hold back.

“It worked,” Izaya comments, smile tugging higher on his face and his eyes lighting up in the way that speaks of his true joy rather than the mania-type that Shizuo sees when he’s got his switchblade in his hand or is winning at taunting someone.  “I’m getting good at reading the beast.”

It’s a conscious effort of calling Shizuo “beast” rather than “monster,” Shizuo thinks, because usually Izaya doesn’t like to use the same nicknames more than once in a row, and somehow the realization makes Shizuo smile wider, tilt his weight so that his shoulder hits against Izaya’s, and Izaya stumbles a minimal amount to the side with a chuckle.

Izaya’s starting to be just that much more enjoyable to be around.

\---

“Your knuckle’s bleeding,” Izaya says as he’s closing the door behind them, just as Shizuo is beginning to tug his shoes off to make his way upstairs.

“Huh?”  Shizuo looks down, and while it’s not bleeding anymore, it _is_ red and swollen, and is, for the first time tonight, not exactly comfortable as he consciously thinks about the wound.  “It really doesn’t look that great, does it?”

“Nope,” Izaya agrees, pulling off his own shoes in a single swift motion and sweeping past Shizuo to make his way to the bathroom on the first floor.

“Where are you going?” Shizuo asks, unthinking, attempting to follow with half of one of his shoes still being pulled off.

“To get a bandage or something,” Izaya calls back at him, nodding to Shizuo’s father in the living room.

“Did you get into another fight, Nii-san?” Kasuka’s near-flat voice rises from behind him, in the doorway of the kitchen.

“Oh, yeah, just a little one,” Shizuo responds quickly.  “Nothing like before, though.”

“Hm,” Kasuka gives.  “That’s good.”

“It is,” Izaya’s voice lilts from the bathroom.  “Don’t you have any bandages in here, Shizu-chan?”

“They should be by the band-aids,” Shizuo calls back, flashing a grin at Kasuka and making his way to help Izaya.

“Ah, I found them.”  Izaya looks up as Shizuo appears in the doorway, his face clinging to the smile he had on the way home.  “Hold out your hand.”

“You need to clean it off first,” Shizuo tells him, frowning as he lifts his arm and offers his hand for Izaya to take.

“I know that, thank you, protozoan,” Izaya teases, moving to the hallway to get to the sink, pulling Shizuo by his hand with him.  He shifts Shizuo’s wrist and pulls it under the water, and Shizuo huffs at the determination that sets in at Izaya’s face.

“I’m not that hurt,” Shizuo says.

“What, think I’m worried about you?” Izaya catches his expression, pulling it back into control in the form of a smirk and raising eyebrows from the frown on his face moments before.

“Whatever, flea,” Shizuo grumbles, letting Izaya continue to clean the wound and finally wrap the bandage meticulously around his hand.

Despite the smile Izaya gives him when they’re finished, Shizuo can’t forget the frown Izaya held for mere seconds earlier when he was handling the wound.  It didn’t quite seem like direct worry, but there was something there, and Shizuo can’t help the hunch of his shoulders, for all the uneasiness it brings him in the idea that there’s something wrong that Izaya’s not telling him.

Again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why is Izaya acting weird???? Who knows?? Certainly not me!!!! (One chapter closer to finding out! But when will it be?) Hope you enjoyed! :D


	19. Wonder with Restraint

It’s nearly midnight when Shizuo hears a knock at his door.

“What is it?” he asks his mother, as she tentatively opens the door just enough so that he can see her face, creased with worry.

“Izaya-kun is here,” she says carefully.  “He seems really exhausted.  He said he wanted to see you.”

“Huh?” Shizuo jumps at the mention of _Izaya_ , lifting his feet off the floor with each step rather than the lazy shuffling that usually holds when he’s at home and not in a rush to get anywhere.

When he makes it to the living room, Izaya is there on the couch, head tipped down and looking at his hands in his lap.  His eyes are heavy-lidded, his face in an exhausted frown, mouth curved down in discomfort that twists against Shizuo’s ribcage more than he thinks it should.

“Izaya,” he says, when Izaya doesn’t look up when he enters the room.

“Shizu-chan,” Izaya more or less whispers, with a strange soft edge to it that whispers of its true affection.  “I thought I might take you up on that offer.”

“Offer…”  It takes Shizuo a moment to recall.  “Oh.  Are you OK?”

Izaya sighs a half-laugh as his face lifts just the tiniest bit into true amusement.  “Yes, you caught me, Shizu-chan, I just came over here so I could bother you while you’re trying to get your beauty sleep.”

If it were any other situation, any other time, Shizuo would snort amusement and say _I wouldn’t put it past you_ , but Izaya looks so tired that he can’t bring himself to say anything even in simple teasing spirit.

“What about your sisters?” he asks.  He hadn’t seen them when he was rushing downstairs, and his mother hadn’t mentioned anything about anyone other than Izaya, but there’s still the question weighting on his tongue.

“Your mom took them into the kitchen.”

“Huh?”  Sure enough, when Shizuo cranes his neck to get a look into the brightly-lit room, there his mother is, laughing at something close to the floor, and then he hears Mairu’s whining lilt, and everything becomes crystal clear.  “Oh.”  Shizuo’s mother laughs again at Mairu’s overly loud cry, and Shizuo chuckles.  “Sounds like they’re enjoying themselves.”

“Yeah,” Izaya says, sighing as he sinks against the back of the couch.

“You could take my room,” Shizuo tells him, and Izaya raises his eyebrows in silent question.  “I can sleep on the couch, or I’ve got a bunk bed so I could sleep in the other bed.”

“Do you sleep on the top or the bottom?”

“Huh?”

“You said you had a bunk bed,” Izaya chuckles, throwing up a hand to shrug.  “I want to know if you’re the type of person to take the top bunk or the bottom.”

“When I was little I slept in the bottom bunk so I could get up easier and slip outside if I wanted to, but I usually sleep on the top bunk now.”

“Hm,” Izaya gives, resting his hand back in his lap.  “Which one’s bigger?”

“Why are you asking so many questions about my bunk bed?” Shizuo half-growls, half-laughs in amusement.  “Didn’t you come here to sleep?”

“No, I told you Shizu-chan, I came here to bother you.”  Izaya’s eyes sparkle as he glances at him, his mouth twitching up at the corner.

“Of course,” Shizuo sighs.  “How could I have forgotten.”

They end up both falling asleep on the couch.

Izaya had insisted on putting on movie, as it would “help him sleep,” but then the TV was overtaken by Mairu and Kururi, demanding that their favorite anime was playing a re-run at the hour, and Shizuo’s mother had to lure them away with the promise of a “super special story” if they left Izaya and Shizuo alone.

After that, they had bickered back and forth with teasing remarks until the conversation had slowed, and in a particularly quiet moment as Shizuo was trying to think up a comeback, Izaya’s eyelids dipped and his weight had tipped to the side, until he was abutting Shizuo’s shoulder, breathing small and even.  Shizuo had flinched at the electric-drawing contact, eyes wide as he looked down at Izaya sleeping soundly against him, but the tense in his body had eased immediately when he got a good look at Izaya’s face, previously colored with exhaustion now languid and still clinging to the smile that Shizuo himself caused.

It didn’t take long for Shizuo to fall asleep, too.

\---

“Wake _up_ , Shizu-chan!” is what Shizuo stirs to in the morning, accompanied by a shaking of his shoulder.  “My God, you’re a heavy sleeper.”

“I’m not usually,” Shizuo mumbles, rubbing his eyes clear.  When he looks towards Izaya, his movements are still catching at the edge of sleepiness, stumbling over what is meant to be quick, instead becoming clumsy.  Shizuo’s never seen him look so ungraceful before, and it makes him smile under the minimal weight of tiredness he feels.

“So what now?” Izaya asks, stretching his arms above his head.  Shizuo gives him a quizzical look and Izaya raises his eyebrows.  “It’s a day off, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yeah,” Shizuo says.  “I forgot.”  He makes a glance around the room in off-hand search of someone else, and it’s here that he notices how dark it still is.  “What time is it?”

“Probably around 6, maybe 7,” Izaya tells him, shrugging.

“What?  That means you didn’t actually get that much sleep at all.”  Shizuo folds his eyebrows down and looks back towards Izaya, who’s still sitting unmoving against the cushions with a lazy smirk.  Under further inspection, exhaustion is still coloring under his eyes, making it horribly obvious that he’s still tired.  Shizuo groans.  “Go back to sleep, Izaya.”

“I’m not tired, Shizu-chan,” he whines.  It’s put-on but in the fuzziness of sleepiness Shizuo thinks it’s real for a moment.  “I just get up early, is all.”

“You _are_ tired,” Shizuo insists, shooting him a glare.  “It’s not a school day, it’s still dark outside, and my family won’t be up for another few hours.  _Go to sleep_.”

Izaya blinks a pout at him, but Shizuo doesn’t flinch, just hardens his expression further until Izaya finally sighs and slides down in his seat, swinging his legs up over the opposite end of the couch and resting his head on the cushions next to Shizuo’s leg.

“If you _insist_ ,” he lilts, giving Shizuo a smirk before he closes his eyes and tips himself to the side so that his face is almost hidden against the inside of the couch.

He isn’t completely sure in what he saw, but Shizuo thinks that when he was rattling on with worry over Izaya, his face dropped into what almost looked like sadness, like regret, before feigning cheeriness once more.

It makes him frown, makes him worry whether he should voice the obvious question, or just let it be until it dissipates.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not sure I'm super happy with how this chapter turned out, but I can't deny that it was fun to write. I'm not going to say too much in these end notes until a certain chapter, so I hope you enjoyed and are looking forward to the next chapter! :)


	20. Bitten Peace

“What about a movie, then?” Shizuo says, stumbling in his step as Izaya swerves and almost bumps his hip.

“A movie?”

It’s a day off tomorrow, and neither of them have homework that is too important, and the subject of what to do with the day had hovered over their heads on their way out of the school as quickly as the awareness of the end of the school day had.  Shizuo has so far only gotten one sentence, immediate rejections to his suggestions, so at the sound of hesitation in Izaya’s voice, he smiles in pre-triumph.

“I’m not a girl you can woo over a bag of popcorn and some jump-scare movie that’ll make me grab onto your muscular arms for protection, Shizu-chan.”

Shizuo bites his tongue at the startle the comment brings, and his smile drops fast.

“ _What_?”  Izaya just raises his eyebrows and holds his smirk.  “I’m not- Why would I _think_ that?”  Izaya laughs so loud it’s almost harsh, and Shizuo feels his face burn hot.  “There’s a new American movie that just came out, I thought you might like it because it’s in English.”

“Sounds perfectly delightful,” Izaya’s voice drags across the cooling air of the afternoon.

“Shut up,” Shizuo answers out of pure reflex.  Despite the chill of the wind and the lack of persistent sun to warm his skin, his face still flames hot at what he thinks is blatant rejection from Izaya.

“So when is it playing?”

Izaya is looking straight ahead, falling back into step with Shizuo, eyes seemingly fixed on something far away, as if the question is off-hand and not deliberate and careful as Shizuo knows it is.  “What?”  Izaya doesn’t say anything, but Shizuo wouldn’t wait for a response anyway.  “I think it’s in the afternoon.”

“Hm,” Izaya gives.  He keeps his eyes ahead and his head balanced perfectly, until Shizuo thinks he won’t ever move from the position again.  “I suppose that’ll be an OK way to pass the time.  What about the rest of the day?”

In the swift change of topic over to further planning, it’s hard for Shizuo to closely parse the meaning of Izaya’s first words, but in the moments Izaya gives him to answer, he finds it, and can’t help but voice it.

“Wait,” he says.  “Is that a yes to the movie?”

“Hm?”  Izaya fixes his gaze back to Shizuo, tilting his head sideways and dragging his mouth to a wider smirk.  “Was it not?”

Shizuo just laughs in his obvious happiness over his success.  “OK then,” he says.  “What about your sisters?  We could take them out to get something to eat or something.”

“Be seen in public with my poor little sisters in order to put them in danger?”  Shizuo growls at his comment and Izaya just chuckles.  “Sure, they’d probably like being treated to ice cream by our favorite beast.”

“’Our’?” Shizuo repeats.  He’s sure it wasn’t intentional, but it’s too good of a slip-up to let pass.

“Theirs,” Izaya clarifies too quickly, turning his head to the side in feigned focus on the dipping horizon.  “And I suppose mine, too.  Until I meet a better one.”  Shizuo can hear the smile on his voice.

It takes them longer than it should to get to the road that will take them to Izaya’s house, with their bickering and Izaya’s stopping to attempt to balance himself on a fence near the back of the school.  By the time they’re on it, though, they’ve both gone somewhat silent in about the best peace Shizuo has experienced between them since they met.  It’s fairly quiet outside, too, nearing the end of the day and devoid of most all people to disturb their moments into becoming dissonant and loud.

Shizuo can hear the birds chirping telltale signs of slowing movement, and when a particularly loud one gives off a sound Shizuo nearly jumps at the startle of it.  Instead, though, he ends up turning his head the way the bird called, in search of nothing in particular, when his eyes catch on a small group of men stomping their way towards.

“Here we go,” Shizuo mutters, irritation obvious in the way a snarl is forming at his throat and his hands are twitching for something to grab a hold of.

Izaya makes a humming sound of question and turns his body as well, halting his forward movement and minimally shifting his hands stuffed into the pockets of his jacket.

“Heiwajima Shizuo,” calls the man in the middle of the group.  His voice is gruff and at the edge of being consumed by the obviousness that he smokes, and his appearance fairs no better.  His eyes are shaded by the length of his hair, dyed an obnoxious red that makes Shizuo automatically hate him just that much more, and his clothes tell of the harsh attempt to stand out in a regular crowd.  Standing at quite an impressive height as well, he almost fits into Shizuo’s skin just as well as he does, and looms precariously over the pavement as he tips his weight forward and continues to snarl as he closes the space in between Shizuo and Izaya and himself.  “You _asshole_.”

Usually this would be the space where Izaya would pipe up with a taunt deliberately degrading, obvious in how it fades into the hatred that is always so subtle in the lilt of his voice.  But Shizuo hears nothing, and out of general curiosity he tips his weight to the side in order to get a look at Izaya and possibly raise an eyebrow to question the lack of sound from the other’s mouth, but stops when he sees the expression Izaya is wearing.

He looks terrified, but not quite, shocked and dazed and horrified all in one, standing perfectly stiff with his hands gripping hard to the inside of his pockets.  His eyes are wide and mouth agape, the weight of his obvious upset holding in his shoulders and neck.  When he notices Shizuo’s eyes on him he flinches and looks to the side, forcing his body to loosen and turning his expression into what is probably meant to be haughtiness, into what turns into worry-ridden taunting instead.

“Hey, I’m _talking_ to you, you damn brat!” the thug yells, considerably louder now that Shizuo assumes he must be closer.

But Shizuo can’t spare his attention for the man, not when Izaya is looking so petrified, as if anything in the world has ever dared to be a true threat to him.  Shizuo can’t stop looking at him, can’t gain traction to move or speak, because he thought that whatever was bothering Izaya had dissipated completely, with no events or moments to whisper of his worry in the past few weeks.

“Hey!” the thug yells again.  It sounds closer.

“Izaya,” Shizuo says, instead of answering the man.  Izaya’s head jerks down and his expression falls away from Shizuo’s line of sight.  “What’s the matter?”

Izaya doesn’t answer, and Shizuo can hear the thug drawing closer and louder, so he quickly presses his fingers around Izaya’s wrist, succeeding in making Izaya lift his head in surprise, but draws away as fast as he initiates the movement to turn around and land a harsh punch aimed at the thug’s head.

“Woah!” he hears the man give, as he dips to the side as Shizuo’s fist comes out and his throat rumbles under a growl just as harsh as his swing.

“What the hell do you want,” Shizuo asks, gritting his teeth.  His hand is itching to make angry contact to the guy’s face, and missing his throw isn’t helping the matter.

“What do I _want_?” the thug growls.  “I _want_ my kid brother back, you little shit.”

“What?” Shizuo snarls, backing up as he hears Izaya give something close to a whimper.  “What the hell are you talking about?”  It seems strange to ask the question, especially considering how, just months ago, Shizuo wouldn’t even attempt a conversation before he had all the men in front of him on the ground and unconscious.  Briefly, he thinks it’s Izaya’s doing that he’s more clear-headed during fights.

“My _kid brother_ , you asshole,” the thugs tries again.  “ _And_ my men that you and your _friend_ there made kiss the ground some weeks back.”

“I don’t know anything about your ‘kid brother’,” Shizuo tells him, losing patience by the second.  “And I don’t remember your guys but I’m positive that _they_ were the ones who picked the fight in the first place.”

“Of course they were,” one of the other thugs growls.  His hair is dyed golden, but he almost looks like an exact copy of the other man, discounting his clear voice and shorter height.  “ _You_ were the one who went and killed the boss’ brother, _Heiwajima_.”

“I still don’t know what the _hell_ you’re talking about, and I don’t think I care to find out before I beat you all within an inch of your lives!” Shizuo snarls.  “I’ve never _killed_ anyone!”

“Huh,” the boss feigns as a chuckle.  “Yeah right.  That’s not what _Orihara_ over there has to say about it.”  Shizuo hears Izaya give another half-whimper, and even before the thug’s next words are spoken, Shizuo’s blood goes cold on sudden realization.

“He’s the one who witnessed the whole thing, you know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AAAAAND here it is!!! This chapter was the furthest I'd gotten (besides like bits and pieces later) in solid-idea planning, so the next chapter is a bit of a challenge. Because I'm super busy this week and I haven't got a lot of inspiration for the next chapter, I may end up posting a day late (Sunday instead of Saturday), so apologies in advance if that's what ends up happening. Were any of your guesses right? I know it's kind of specific, but did anyone guess the basic idea of what could be happening? I still haven't completely explained everything yet, but it would be fun to hear your thoughts on it, anyway! (Sorry for the cliff hanger, lol) Hope you enjoyed!


	21. Tremble in Regret

“He’s the one who witnessed the whole thing, you know.”

Shizuo doesn’t hesitate to slam his fist against the thug’s jaw.

The rest of the fight happens in a blur, and as he’s knocking out the remaining five members of the group he distantly registers that one of them attempts to fire off a gun, before Shizuo’s knee makes contact with his gut and there’s a clanking sound against the ground, followed by a thud to indicate the falling of the man.

It’s strange and vaguely frightening how swiftly Shizuo clicks back into the blind fury that used to consume him on a regular basis, as he punches away men that he doesn’t bother looking at.  It feels almost good to be so angry again, but Shizuo doesn’t know who he’s angrier at, if he’s just beating up the thugs because of the convenience of their vicinity and leaving Izaya standing behind him with an expression that Shizuo knows will only blow his anger higher.

When the final of the group falls to the ground, Shizuo is panting, growling in his throat as he attempts to regain his composure enough to turn back to Izaya and find out what the _hell_ is going on.

When he finally does though, he flinches despite himself at the way Izaya looks.

His head is tipped down, jaw blatantly tight on strain and eyes hidden from view behind his hair.  He’s pivoted away from Shizuo, in a way that suggests he pondered leaving before thinking twice about it.  Shizuo doesn’t know what would make him stay.

“Hey,” Shizuo hears the leader of the thugs’ gang croak behind him on the pavement.  “Hey, you!”

Shizuo gives a low growl in his throat and quickly wrests himself from his spot, stomping his way toward Izaya as the thug is still shouting behind.

“Heiwajima!” he yells.  “You better-“

“Shut _up_!” Shizuo shouts, harshly grabbing Izaya’s wrist and tugging him along as he rushes to a side street to get away from the chaos of the situation.

Izaya is surprisingly pliant, as if he’s already capitulated to whatever Shizuo has in store for him before it’s even to be determined by Shizuo himself, and the brief thought makes Shizuo’s stomach churn, but he refuses to admit that it’s worry over the ire he paints it as.

“Please tell me this is the time the beast’s intelligence matches his stupid strength,” Izaya near-whispers as Shizuo pulls him around into an alley, blocks away from the gang and the peace Shizuo hopes isn’t lost for good.

“What?” Shizuo growls, harsher than intended.  He dares a look at Izaya’s face, loosening his grip on his wrist and tipping his own head down in mirror of Izaya.

He can’t see Izaya’s expression at all though, his face completely hidden by his hair as his head is tilted so far down that Shizuo can’t believe it’s at all comfortable.  He makes a shaky breath, and for a moment Shizuo remembers the comfort he found in Izaya’s consolation, and thinks he might do the same, if it were any other situation.

But before Shizuo can even decide, his head comes up, and within a half-breath he’s staring into Shizuo’s eyes, frowning put-on haughtiness that hums its way through his features to his mouth that’s curling into the long-hated smirk that Shizuo has just recently come to enjoy in its playfulness.  But this is different, like Izaya’s deliberately trying to be something, like he’s panicked and can’t find any other way out than switching on his pride that bleeds with seek for attention more than anything else, now that Shizuo knows him better.

“Were you surprised?” he finally says, forcing his smirk to rise higher.  The tension is still sitting in his jaw.  “Did you think I was really your friend?”

But it’s too quick, it’s too outright, and Shizuo won’t fall for it, even with the rage bubbling through his veins.

“Izaya-“

“Did you think that I wouldn’t do something like this at some point?”  It’s too hurried, too precarious.  “You thought you could trust me, did you?”

“ _Izaya_ ,” Shizuo says, tightening his grip on Izaya’s wrist for emphasis to tell him to listen.  “ _Why_ did you start that rumor?  And why is it only coming back now, what did you do that set them off again?”

“I thought it would be fun,” Izaya says too quickly.  He’s still looking at Shizuo straight-on.  His eyes are bleeding that strange red tinge.  “To make you think for a while that we could be friends, and then give you the ultimate gift in order to show my gratitude towards all your kindness.  What do you think?”

“Why are you lying?” Shizuo snarls, closing the distance in between his face and Izaya’s.  His smirk still doesn’t falter, but Shizuo can feel him flinch as Shizuo’s forehead presses hard against his.  “You started that rumor before we made our truce, and I don’t believe that you’re such a masochist that you would keep it going even after just so you could get me angry and I could beat you for it.”

“You have a monster’s brain,” Izaya says, his voice perfectly level for all the panic that Shizuo can see underneath his expression.  “You wouldn’t be able to understand it even if you tried."

“ _Monster_?” Shizuo growls.  “When did you start calling me that again?  What are _doing_ , Izaya, I _know_ you’re lying.”

“I’m not, but it must have been a good show to make you think I am,” Izaya tells him.  “You don’t know me, Shizu-chan.”

“I _do_ ,” Shizuo snarls, pressing his forehead harder against Izaya’s.  Expectedly, he doesn’t falter.  “I _know_ you, I can see it in your face, you’re _lying_ , Izaya.”

“Oh no, am I making the monster angry again?” Izaya lilts.  “Good, it’s been a while since we last had a good spar, let’s start back up with those today, huh?”  But it’s too fast-paced, the words falling against themselves as much as Izaya’s breath is falling against Shizuo’s own mouth, and Shizuo tightens his fingers around Izaya’s wrist, watches his smirk pull higher, before he dares to speak.

“You did this on purpose,” he says, quietly, the words going taut at the end to make it more of an inquiry than a statement.

“I did,” Izaya says.  “Strange how hanging around me for a few weeks can boost a monster’s IQ.”

“It was a more than a few weeks,” Shizuo says, biting off the words so that they contrast sharply with his previous remark.  “This is stupid, Izaya, I _know_ you’re lying, I just don’t know _why_.”

“I told you, Shizu-chan,” Izaya drawls, attempting for the first time to tug his arm free from Shizuo’s grip as his head tips back down so that his expression is out of Shizuo’s eye.  “It was a show, a good one, too, apparently.  Have fun with that gang, they’re pretty angry at you for killing their boss’ little brother.”  He tries again to pull away, tugging his arm in attempt to wrest it free from Shizuo’s half-hearted grip, and finds out quickly, as if he hadn’t already known, that it’s futile.

“Izaya.”

“I realize you’re having a hard time taking in the fact that I’ve been deceiving you this whole time just so I could see you killed by a random gang in Ikebukuro, but _I’ve been deceiving you this whole time so I could see you killed by a random gang in Ikebukuro_ ,” he says, near-growling the last half of his words.  “Now, I have other business to attend to, so why don’t you let me go and we can go on our way as being enemies again?”

Izaya’s pushing at Shizuo’s chest now, trying to pull his way from Shizuo’s grip as much as push himself away from it, in an uncoordinated fashion that makes Shizuo’s heart twist.  So much so that in a single motion Shizuo lifts his other hand and stills Izaya by way of grabbing his shoulder, as Izaya makes a sound high on surprise as much as frustration.

“I _said_ to let me go, monster,” he bites, thrashing in Shizuo’s hold.  “We’re _not_ friends.”  But his voice is tipping precariously towards breaking, Shizuo can hear it, and by the time Izaya finally gives in and halts his attempts to get free, Shizuo can feel the trembles shuddering through Izaya’s body.  He can hear the shaky breaths, and the hiccup under them, but doesn’t dare attempt to make Izaya look at him.  He’s too afraid of what he might find.

They stand there for a long while, long enough that Shizuo can’t begin tell if the trembling in Izaya’s body is from the dipping cold of the evening or something else, but it’s here that he decides to finally let him go, and pray that he’ll stay.

“Do you regret making a truce with me?”

It’s sudden and quiet, and Shizuo thinks about ignoring it, but Izaya tips his head up the tiniest bit, as if he’s expecting an answer, and Shizuo breathes in the chilling air, and speaks the first serious lie to Izaya he’s ever told.

“Maybe.”

It’s not that he means to say it.  It was the first thing on his tongue, conflicting harshly with the affection that he can still, even in this moment, feel for Izaya and everything about him, but he unthinkingly let it free of his throat before he had a chance to call it back.  He instantly wishes he hadn’t.

Izaya takes a deep breath, and turns his back to Shizuo, and starts to walk, without any more than a wave of his hand and an, “I’m sure you’ll come to the right conclusion,” strained with feigned off-handedness that Shizuo knows is taking all his energy to force.

Even at the front door to his house, Shizuo can’t stop remembering the feeling of Izaya trembling under his grip.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies again for posting a day late! I've been really busy and was planning to write this chapter on Friday so that I would be able to get it up on time, but I ended up working concession for my school's biggest football game of the year, so I didn't get home until late (we won, though, and broke a long streak of losing!). Anyway, this chapter didn't exactly come out the way I wanted it to, but I hope you enjoyed it regardless! :)


	22. Threat

The early morning does little in settling Shizuo’s unease from the day before.  It’s almost as if he’s back to months ago, when he spent sleepless nights wondering if he had killed Izaya, as if that ebbing panic has risen back into his veins and begun to electrocute him back into the anxiety he’s so familiar with, now.

He thinks he should be angry — that Izaya lied, that he potentially set a gang up to kill him — but he’s got more worry than anything drilling against the back of his head, as if it’s just that, more than the sleeplessness it more likely is.

It’s their day off, and Shizuo knows that there’s very little chance that Izaya will want to see him, let alone spend significant time with him, but he finds himself rushing out the door before he can even inform anyone in the house of where he’s going, regardless of it.

The streets are quiet without the bustle of normal weekly footsteps to fall across the pavement and the treading of bike tires to breeze past Shizuo’s panic-laced speedwalking, but it at least makes a tiny bit of his unease sink and dissipate away.  He thinks that maybe, so early in the morning, Izaya will answer the door, or at least be at home, sleepiness still dragging at his coherency so that Shizuo will have a better chance at being able to properly speak to him before the door gets slammed in his face or a knife begins to press against the not-so-fragileness of his skin.

But when he makes it to Izaya’s front steps to knock on the door, he gets none of what he wants.

The house is dark and silent, more than usual it seems to Shizuo, and even as he’s knocking his knuckles against the light of the door he knows there’ll be no answer, and that the raggedness in his breath more from worry than strain is for nothing, at least in the short run.  It’s more than enough to force Shizuo to retreat, and to feel the growl of frustration claw its way up into his throat.

He hastily runs a hand through his still-disheveled hair from the toss and turn of the night, and looks around the street, as if Izaya is going to magically appear back into Shizuo’s eyesight so that he can attempt to coax truth out of him again.  It’s dumb and uncoordinated, and he gives up easily.

Somehow in his anxiety-prickled state he starts to walk again, back to home he supposes, and finds himself wandering through thoughts of where Izaya could possibly be, with his sisters in tow.  It occurs to him that Izaya could have simply decided to ignore Shizuo while still being inside the house, but Shizuo brushes the thought off quickly as he remembers the ever-telling scent and presence Izaya carries with him wherever he goes, and can’t find himself remembering either of those things back at the steps to Izaya’s house.

“Hey, punk!” a sudden voice hails from across the street — close enough that Shizuo can feel a jolt of surprise in the startle of his thoughts as well as the idea that someone else is out so early in the morning — but far enough away that Shizuo doesn’t turn his head to the words until he comes to a complete stop on the sidewalk.

“You got a lot of people on your head right now, you know that?” the voice says, but Shizuo isn’t sparing any of his focus to really zoom in on his features and bring them into his true vision.

“And I suppose you’re from that damn gang who thinks I killed someone,” Shizuo growls in return, carrying his voice high in the air over the width of the street so that it reaches the man appropriately.  He’s realizing how much his words are sounding like Izaya’s again, but in the ire that’s beginning to tug back to his body, he can’t find it in himself to appreciate it as much as he wants.

“No,” the thug replies.  “I’m just a lone wolf, you see.  Got a fight to pick with you, though, for sure.”  Shizuo narrows his eyes, and notices that the man _is_ alone, standing with his hands in the pockets of his disgustingly-red slacking trousers, leaning back as if he’s attempting to lean against the wall behind but isn’t quite able to touch it.

And then it’s just as Shizuo is opening his mouth to ask, “What the hell do you want?” that he hears a childish cry behind him before feeling the weight of an impact of a body and a pinprick in his side that feels vaguely like an injury if Shizuo wasn’t so feeling so electric with frustration.

He snarls, takes less than a minute to shove the man clinging to his back off and turn him to scraping against the ground, before whipping around to the other assaulter who’s wicked grin drops into the all-too-familiar terror that Shizuo, in the last few months, has been lucky enough not to have seen.  The man on the ground hisses something, an insult probably, and Shizuo kicks his foot out and back to stop against the side of him, keeping his eyes fixed on the thug in front of him, holding a long knife in one hand and nothing in the other.

The man yelps something equally as childish as the cry Shizuo heard before, and under the haze of ire he reaches out for the thug’s collar, and makes no hesitation in tossing him roughly into the brick wall to Shizuo’s left.

“I don’t _need_ this,” Shizuo growls, stalking his way across the street as his voice carries harder and lower across the increasingly smaller distance between him and the first thug, now standing frozen against the brick wall along that side of the street.  “I don’t _need_ this!”

“I-It wasn’t our idea,” the shivering thug says, sliding himself away from Shizuo as he approaches.  “I-It was Orihara Izaya, he’s the one who hired us!”

“ _Izaya_?” Shizuo growls, without meaning to, leaning in to the thug’s face as he grabs the collar of his obnoxiously red shirt.  “And _why the hell_ would he do that?”

“H-He said he wanted to send you a message,” he stammers, eyes disappearing under the strain of his eyelids as he shakes fear under Shizuo’s grip.  “I swear, we were just paid to do this, w-we didn’t mean anything by it!”

Under the distraction of _Izaya_ under his thoughts, Shizuo ends up letting the man go, as he begins to make his way back home with a rush he doesn’t mean to use but doesn’t really care much about.

If Izaya is still reaching out in even the tiniest of ways, Shizuo can find the still-valid plea for attention that Izaya always so desires to hold from Shizuo.  He can still see a chance, even under the indignation he so holds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry again for the extra wait, and for having to delete the previous chapter 22. I re-worked the plot a bit and decided to re-write. Again, if you've already read the first chapter 22 please disregard it (but also there are some things in there that I kept hahahhaha......)! Hope you enjoyed, and the next chapter will be out on Tuesday!


	23. Inquire

Shizuo doesn’t go home like he should.  Instead he finds his footsteps leading him to Shinra’s, and it may be a long shot, but he knows that Izaya has been friends with Shinra for a long time, and if there’s anyone who knows him better, it’s got to be him.

It’s a far longer walk to Shinra’s house, Shizuo thinks, than usual, with the rising sense of panic that keeps in his chest all throughout the trip there, as the scab-covered scrapes from his fight earlier hum with pain and the wound in his side tickles discomfort against his skin.

When he’s in the hallway of Shinra’s apartment he doesn’t even notice how far he’s walked, but doesn’t much bother much with it more than a half-moment before he’s reaching out to hit the side of his fist to the door in order to avoid breaking the scabs back open on his knuckles.

When the door comes open, Shizuo is ready to grimace at the obnoxiously loud cheer that slaps him in the face each time he’s in the presence of Shinra, but instead the space reveals a black figure, seemingly unwonted bright-colored riding helmet sitting atop its neck.

 “Celty,” Shizuo says dumbly, eyes going wide at a perfectly reasonable sight.

 Celty waves, and pulls out her PDA, and is typing and showing Shizuo a message before he even has time to close his gaping mouth.

_“You look like you’ve been in a fight, are you OK?”_

“Ah, yeah, I think I got stabbed,” he says, stepping inside as Celty moves out of the way to let him through.  Upon hearing the comment she jumps, and begins rapidly typing.  “Oh, no, it’s not that bad.  It’s not even bleeding, see?”  He quickly turns to the side to allow Celty access to the subject, and as she lifts his shirt to get a better look at the thin wound that looks more like a large pin-prick than anything, her shoulders sag.

_“Looks like it just needs a bit of cleaning and maybe a band-aid.  Shinra’s not home right now, but I think I can do it.”_

“Oh, thanks,” he gives half-heartedly, as Celty gestures for him to follow her into the living room and onto the couch.

From the day they met, Shizuo’s always known what Celty is, but none of it has really bothered him in any way past the first moment of enlightenment toward the subject.  He likes Celty; she listens, and is much more understanding than anyone he’s ever met, and there’s been no time when even the vague thought of losing his temper on her has crossed his mind.  It’s comfortable to be in her presence, and in the current situation and time, it gives him some much-needed room to breathe.

When she comes back from some room in the back with a few tools and bandages, Shizuo takes a breath that he notices is less steady than he would think, but as Celty begins to work on his wounds, he finds a bit more comfort in speaking.

“I’m worried about Izaya,” he mumbles, as Celty presses an alcohol-soaked cloth against his side.  “Yesterday a gang came after me, and they think I killed someone.  I think Izaya thought it was best to pretend like it was his doing, so he’s gone back to how we were before.  Enemies, I mean.”

Celty pauses in her work, and lifts a shadow to type into her PDA as she continues.  _“He panicked.”_

”Well, I guess, yeah,” Shizuo says, frowning.  “Did Shinra ever tell you about that rumor he started?  It was that.  I guess it has some tie to that gang.”

_“Was it who attacked you today?”_

“No, but they told me that Izaya sent them.”  He gives a moment of pause.  “I’m worried.”

_“I don’t know a lot about the whole thing, but Izaya’s hired me a couple of times to transport some information to a gang in the last couple of months.  Do you think he’s in trouble?”_

Upon seeing the message Shizuo’s breath startles out of him, and between the rigidness he’s holding to let Celty fix his wounds and the strain in his body over the anxiety that is pressing so roughly against his chest, he can’t help the sound of unease that leaves his mouth, and the frown across his face that spreads as quickly as he reads the words.

_“Ah, that’s not what I meant!  I’m sure he’s OK right now, but I think he’s gotten himself into something troubling, at least.”_

Shizuo takes in a deep breath in attempt to calm himself, at the appended part of Celty’s words, and waits until she’s applied a bandage to his side and has cleaned off his knuckles to speak again.

“He was completely lying yesterday,” he says quietly.  “It was like he just switched on a stranger and abandoned everything else.”

_“What do you mean?”_

“When I tried to confront him about the rumor he started telling me that he did all of this on purpose, but it was like he was back to how he used to talk to me before the truce.”  He waits a second, as Celty is typing out a response with her hands this time.  “It scared me.”

Celty pauses, and tips her helmet up so that it almost looks as if she has a head underneath that is straining to look up at Shizuo, and quickly deletes the message she had been typing and inputs a new one.

_“He’s not thinking straight, I don’t think.  Izaya seems like the kind of person to do something like that when things go wrong.”_

Just as Shizuo is about to prompt for more, the door clicks in favor of bringing it swinging open, and Shinra calls out an overly excited “I’m home,” and suddenly Shizuo is in presence of two equally as strange forms.

“Ah, Shizuo-kun!” Shinra lilts with too much mirth that makes Shizuo’s head hurt under his already-heavy stress.  “What brings you here?  Are you trying to steal my dear Celty away from me?”

“No,” Shizuo growls.  “I came to talk to some glasses-wearing jerk but he wasn’t home.”

“Oh!” Shinra says, setting down the plastic bag he had been carrying with him.  “What did you need?  It’s strange to see you without Izaya.”

Despite all that’s happening Shizuo can feel his face heat, but pushes past it to ask what he wanted to in the first place.  “Has Izaya told you anything about that rumor he started?”

“Rumor?” Shinra tilts his head in confusion, before Celty walks over and shows him something on her PDA, and he makes a sound of realization.  “Oh, that rumor!  No, he hasn’t.  Why, did something happen?  Hm?”  Celty taps his shoulder and shows him her PDA again, thankfully saving Shizuo the repeat of having to explain the story, and as she does Shizuo can see Shinra’s face drop in seriousness that he has only seen a select few times in his life.

“Izaya hasn’t told me anything about it, but it sounds like him,” he says.  “He’s never really had a friend like you before, Shizuo-kun, I’m not sure he knows what to do.  He’s only human.”

The words are enough to keep Shizuo looping them in his head all the way home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I haven't been able to include Celty as much as I wanted to in this story, but I find that she's pretty difficult to write. She's a really complex character and her mannerisms, speaking style, etc. are kind of strange. But regardless this was fun to write, and I hope you enjoyed!  
> Edit: My computer was down for a while, I'm so so sorry that I can't get the chapter up yet! Tomorrow for sure, though!


	24. Strained Words

Shizuo leaves school halfway through the day, after a lunch without Izaya and lessons that he doesn’t bother listening to.  Instead he gives another try to Izaya’s house, and then has to fight off a couple of thugs that thought trailing him and waiting for the right opportunity would be a good idea.  By the time it’s all over though, it’s already getting later in the day, and he realizes that he could’ve simply stayed at school and been more productive even with the distraction of worry above his head.

But then as he’s walking to make his way home he passes a school, and stops dead in his tracks when he remembers what day it is.

It’s Monday — it’s the day Izaya had told him they would have to stop after school and pick up his sisters from an event, and in the sudden remembrance, Shizuo hastily scrambles to look at the time on the clock at the front of the school, and takes off running in the opposite direction as to get where he needs to be.  Where _Izaya_ will be.

The trip is even shorter with the full-out sprinting Shizuo is offering to his limbs, and when he gets to the front gates of his destination, Izaya is there with the twins, walking away with his back turned.  He’s got one of them — Kururi, Shizuo notices — under his arm, while Mairu clutches the hem of his sweatshirt and whines something unintelligible that makes Shizuo smile with the easing stress of the moment, as he breathes an involuntary sigh of relief seeing that Izaya is safe.

Shizuo gives a tentative step toward him as Izaya begins to pick up his pace against the pavement, and as he reaches out to tap against his shoulder he has a sudden flash of a better idea, and swivels to stop in front of Izaya so that there’s a lesser chance of him running on first sight.

“Iza-“

“What are you doing here?” Izaya bites, as his eyes go wide and his movement stills at the obstruction of Shizuo in front of him.  His eyes look redder than usual, too, shadowed by exhaustion that makes Shizuo frown with the worry that is swelling back up in his chest.

“I-“  Shizuo doesn’t know what to say.  “I don’t know.  You weren’t at home yesterday.”

“For good reason,” Izaya hisses, as Kururi’s head comes up from Izaya’s shoulder, her eyes red and swollen with what Shizuo assumes is tears, to get a look at the commotion.  “I was trying to get away from a certain monster.”  Shizuo takes a breath of air to begin to protest, but Mairu gives a questioning sound, and Izaya cuts him off.  “You’re endangering my sisters by being here.”

“What?” Shizuo says dumbly, turning his attention to Mairu, still clutching Izaya’s shirt, looking up at him with wide eyes, as quiet as Shizuo has ever heard her.  He supposes that even little kids can act accordingly when they sense that something is off.

“You have gangs after you, Shizu-chan,” Izaya sneers.  His eyes are dipping as if he’s about to fall asleep, but the bite of his words is unmistakable.  “And from the looks of it, it seems one came after you today.  By being here and interacting with me, you’re making my sisters a target to anyone who sees or hears about this.”

“I didn’t mean-“

“You’re better staying away,” Izaya says quickly, pushing past him with a speed set into his steps that is as agile as ever, if with a bit of a stumble from what Shizuo thinks is sleepiness.  But the words aren’t convincing, at least not to Shizuo, not when he can hear the wobble that threatens to break free completely from Izaya’s throat at the sentence that truncated his.

“No,” Shizuo says, unthinking.  He turns around and repeats his initial movement to stop Izaya, watching as Mairu stumbles to come to a sudden halt.  “I’m not, I _can’t_ , I won’t let you keep pretending that this was intentional.”

“Are we back to that?” Izaya snaps, sigh audible in his throat as he shuts his eyes for a moment before brining them back open, blinking rapidly.  “I told you, monster, we’re _not friends_.”

“We are,” Shizuo says softly.  It’s more to convince himself than Izaya, though.  He’s looking down, watching as Izaya’s hand balls into a fist, and Shizuo wants to grab his wrist, but he knows that if he does it’ll only makes things worse.  Instead he looks back up again, and cracks a tiny smile at Kururi when he notices her looking at him, sniffling.  “I’m already here, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“I can leave,” Izaya says dully, making a move to shift his feet into walking again.  Shizuo steps in front of him again, and Izaya stumbles.

“You can’t just erase everything by pretending to hate me again and calling me ‘monster’,” Shizuo says, a bit harder than his previous words.  “I’m not going anywhere.”

Izaya looks up at him then, eyes wide but his expression dark, exhaustion and something that seems like hurt coloring along his features, and Shizuo suddenly can’t gather any self-restraint anymore, as his hand comes out to wrap around Izaya’s wrist, and he takes a step in to close the space between them.

“Shizu-cha-“ Izaya gives, stopping halfway through as Shizuo takes another step closer.  He jumps, stumbling to fall away from the contact and proximity Shizuo is giving him.  His hold on Kururi buckles, and she gives a squeaking sound as she comes sliding out from under Izaya’s arm.

“Please,” Shizuo says, shifting so that he catches Kururi before Izaya does, with as much calm as he can muster.  She instantly buries her face into Shizuo’s shirt and whimpers against her tears.

Izaya blinks, the motion slow and uncoordinated, and he shakes his head, frowning down at his hand as he pulls in attempt to escape Shizuo’s ever-holding grip.  He pulls a couple of times more before giving up and trying to reach back for Kururi, when suddenly he inhales a shaky breath, and Shizuo notices too late that Izaya’s been trembling this whole time.

His weight sinks underneath him, his eyes flutter closed, and Shizuo has to set Kururi down next to Mairu in order to catch him from falling against the pavement.  Mairu shrieks and Kururi whimpers behind him, Shizuo’s panic spikes.  Izaya has _passed out_ , right in front of him, and the situation makes him think about the last time something like this happened, and it makes his own limbs shake as he frantically checks to make sure there’s no blood flowing from Izaya’s head.

“Izaya,” he says, trembling so badly that there’s no need to add to the shaking to attempt to wake Izaya up.  “Izaya, wake up, please.”

“Shizu-nii,” Mairu whines, more like over-pronounced joy than distress.

“Hold on, Mairu-chan,” Shizuo gives, voice audibly shaking as much as his limbs.  She clutches Shizuo’s jacket.  “I know, just- just give me a second.”

Upon further inspection, Izaya looks as though he’s only fallen asleep, though he does he feel like he’s got a bit of a fever, but he doesn’t seem hurt, and his breathing is steady and even, enough so that Shizuo is able to stand again, Izaya precariously held in his arms as he attempts to balance his bag around his shoulder as well, all against the trembling still holding in his body.

“Can you two follow behind me?” Shizuo asks the twins, breathing in shakily as he attempts to calm himself.  “I have to carry Izaya back home.”

Mairu gives an odd “yeah,” Kururi frantically nods, and even though there is still panic pounding against Shizuo’s head, he has Izaya in his arms, and Izaya’s sisters in his care, and he’d be lying if he said he didn’t notice that there’s a tiny comfort in having it be a reality that has all of them relatively safe, with _Shizuo_ still in the same sentence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again, sorry for the wait! My computer crashed and wouldn't turn on for a while, so I couldn't get to the document I write in. Anyway, the story isn't nearly over, so this is just the beginning!! Hope you enjoyed! :)


	25. Difficult to Counter

Izaya sleeps for a long time, long enough that when it suddenly gets dark, Shizuo has to momentarily run home to tell his family that he’s staying over at a friend’s house so that they won’t worry.  Luckily, they don’t question it, even with it being a Monday night.

When he arrives back Izaya is still asleep, and Mairu and Kururi are half-asleep themselves in front of the TV.  Izaya had ended up having a fever like Shizuo had thought, but checking now, it’s gone down, and there’s a sigh of relief that comes with it at the reality that Izaya really is OK, more or less.

“Shizu-nii,” Mairu mumbles as Shizuo comes around to sit next to the twins on the couch.

“Yeah?” Shizuo asks quietly, smiling at the two of them as his worry begins to dissipate over Izaya’s condition and the nickname lights affection up across his face.

“Did Iza-nii do something wrong?”

“What?”  Despite the question and the unease it brings with it, Shizuo tries to keep his smile, at least partially, and forces a little laugh over the returned question.  “What do you mean?”

“He’s been spending a lot of time working,” she says, rubbing her eyes and yawning.  “When I asked him why he treated me like a kid, though,” she adds, pouting.

“You _are_ a kid,” Shizuo says affectionately, patting her head.  She pouts again.  “What did he tell you?”

“He said he had to fix something and that we didn’t need to know because we were too little to get it.”  Her eyebrows furrow in what Shizuo supposes is meant to be anger, but in the state she’s in it just looks funny.  “Iza-nii is mean.”

“Truthful,” Kururi says from behind her sister, partially startling Shizuo as he realizes that she’s also awake.

“He’s not,” Shizuo chuckles.  “I’m sure he just didn’t want to get you two involved in something dangerous.”

“Iza-nii always wants to get people involved in something dangerous!” she says, throwing her fists in the air comically.

Despite the truth Shizuo hears under the comic tone, somehow it gets softened by the nickname she uses on Izaya, and as if on cue, Izaya stirs on the far side of the couch, shifting onto his side and rubbing his eyes in strange mirror of his sister.  Shizuo smiles crooked at it, and when Izaya blinks his eyes fully into awareness it’s the first thing Shizuo watches his eyes focus on, as he cracks a smile himself at the sight before catching himself and frowning.

“What happened?” he says, as if he can’t already put the pieces together himself.

“You passed out and I took you home,” Shizuo responds carefully, letting his smile fade.  “Sorry.”

“For what?” Izaya asks, sitting up and unthinkingly moving closer toward Shizuo.  He takes a glance at his sisters before focusing his attention back.

“I shouldn’t have come to your sisters’ school,” Shizuo says, lowering his head so that it’s almost out of sight completely.

Izaya doesn’t say anything, but when Shizuo sneaks a glance at him he doesn’t look angry, more tired than anything.  When he notices Shizuo watching him he shifts to stand up, and Shizuo instantly follows him.

“So what now?” Izaya says, stretching his arms over his head as he makes his way into the kitchen.

“Ah, you probably shouldn’t get up yet, you still kind of have a fever,” Shizuo finds himself saying, before he can call it back.

“I’m fine,” Izaya lilts.  “But thanks for your concern, Shizu-chan.”  At the appended, he gives a glance over his shoulder at Shizuo, and he sees once more the ever-present smirk creep back onto Izaya’s lips, if a little softer than usual.  “So what now?”

“I don’t know,” Shizuo says, frowning as he doesn’t quite understand Izaya’s question.  “Are you talking about right now, like for dinner, or about us?”

“Us,” Izaya says immediately, not bothering to tease Shizuo for his misunderstanding this time.  Part of Shizuo misses it.  “The gang.  The rumor, all of it.”

“Like I said, I’m already here, so there’s no point in lying anymore,” Shizuo half-growls, irritation gathering at the subject once more.

“Clearly,” Izaya tells him, as he grabs a bag of instant ramen from the cabinet and starts to set a pot on the stove.  “I thought you might, for once, have a brain that matches your pure dumb strength when it came to this, but I guess I was wrong.”

“Yeah,” Shizuo agrees.  “So will you tell me what’s going on?”

“No,” Izaya says immediately, with a bit of a lilt.

“Why not?” Shizuo snarls, taking a step closer to Izaya.

“If you know too much then it’ll be harder to get this whole thing cleared.”  He pops open the bag of ramen and drops the contents into the boiling water, waiting until he’s thrown away the trash to speak again.  “You barely know anything as it is and it’s already difficult, and this is just some pip-squeak gang.”

“You’re… trying to get them to stop coming after me?”  Shizuo already knew it, at least subconsciously, but hearing it spoken as directly as it can get from Izaya makes him think twice about it, and realize just the real capacity of the fact.

“I’m trying to get them to pay attention to the real killer,” Izaya says.  “That’s all I’m going to tell you, though.  Wouldn’t want your brain to overheat, beast.”

 _Beast_.  It distracts Shizuo from the insult in the comment, and allows him to think clearly before he speaks again.

“But wait, this rumor was from months ago.  Why did they only _now_ come after me?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Izaya hums, stirring the noodles in the boiling water before clicking the stove off.  “Here, come split this with me, Shizu-chan, I only have one package left.”

“You’re still acting like that,” Shizuo grumbles, as he distributes the noodles and broth into two bowls.

“Acting like what?” Izaya asks, the sound echoing as he walks back into the living room.

“Like we’re not friends.  You’ve at least stopped treating me like an enemy again but now you’re acting like we’re acquaintances, at best.”

Shizuo finishes making the bowls and brings them into the living room with chopsticks, frowning as Izaya takes the bowl without commenting on his statement.  Shizuo opens his mouth to pester him with a couple harsh words more, but as Izaya ducks his head and brings the bowl closer to his face to begin eating, Shizuo can see that he’s still exhausted, from the shadow of color under his eyes to the dullness of his usually-glowing near-crimson eyes.

So instead Shizuo just takes a seat next to him, closer than they were when Izaya first woke up, close enough that it’s as if there’s only a small rectangle of room for the two of them on the couch, instead of the huge expanse of it, discounting the twins now asleep on the far end.  They eat in silence, and neither of them get up when they’re finished to put the bowls in the kitchen, but it’s not for a while anyway that either of them speak, either.

“Don’t you need to go home?” Izaya asks suddenly, after nearly a half hour of silence between them, his voice weighted like it wasn’t before, as if with sleep.

Shizuo looks sideways at him, seeing the tiredness that is forcing him to sag into the cushions behind, and smiles, and tells Izaya, “I told you, I’m not going anywhere.”

Izaya falls asleep with his shoulder pressing against Shizuo’s mere seconds after.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I forgot to post this this morning hahahahahaha..aha...ha... Oh well, it's here now. Anyway, hope you enjoyed!


	26. Caught in Inexperience

“Are you sure you’ll be OK?” Shizuo says, as he’s throwing his schoolbag over his shoulder and turning to open the door that will take him out of Izaya’s house.

“ _Yes_ , Shizu-chan, I’m inside my own home, I don’t know what kind of trouble you think will occur here,” Izaya gives back, the tone edging closer and closer toward irritation as Shizuo continues to ask variations of the same question.

He wants to ask again, just to reiterate that he’s worried, but then he feels Izaya push against his back and force him forward as the door comes open from Izaya’s hand instead of Shizuo’s, and with force that Shizuo doesn’t try to stop, Izaya pushes him outside.

“I’ll come by at lunch,” Shizuo tells him hastily, impatience and worry causing his hands to twitch.

“You don’t have to do that,” Izaya sighs.  “I’ll probably just be asleep anyway.”

“You won’t,” Shizuo insists, and adjusts the set of his bag along his shoulder just so that he has an excuse to be standing there for longer, however small the time frame is.

“And you think you know that because…?” Izaya says, his expression breaking into amusement that makes his face look bright and his eyes crimson.

“Because,” Shizuo answers vaguely, not bothering to notice that it’s not a real answer at all.  He’s too busy enjoying the way Izaya looks, and realizing that he’s got a smile of his own, and suddenly being hit with an unexplainable want to kiss Izaya.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense, Shizuo thinks.  They’re not doing anything even remotely romantic, Izaya isn’t flirting, and Shizuo is still aching with worry for Izaya more than anything else. But all the same the want is there, and Shizuo has to stop himself from reaching out to touch Izaya as his smile catches higher and Shizuo’s does the same.

“I’ll be here at lunch,” Shizuo says again, noticing that his voice is higher than before.  He turns away quickly, before he can decide to do something stupid, and is rushing across the street and onto the sidewalk without ever letting his smile as much as flicker out of its stance.  His cheeks feel warm, but the happiness and the impatience to be near Izaya again is stronger, and it’s enough to occupy him until he arrives at school and is met by Shinra.

“Good morning, Shizuo-kun!” Shinra lilts, waving enthusiastically as soon as he sees Shizuo some distance away from where he stands.  In the morning sunlight, his glasses look solid white.

“Morning,” Shizuo mirrors, knowing well that he rarely gives voice to a “good morning.”  Shinra doesn’t comment on it, but what he _does_ comment on is much worse, Shizuo thinks.

“Hm?  Your clothes look ruffled, did you not change last night?”

“Huh?”  Shizuo flinches, and looks down at his uniform, and feels his face flame in embarrassment as he realizes that he _hasn’t_ changed since yesterday, since he fell asleep on Izaya’s couch and didn’t bother grabbing a change of clothes when he went home for a short time.  “I-I forgot.”

“Where’s Izaya?” Shinra suddenly inquires, looking around as if in any lifetime he could miss spotting the bastard.

“At home,” Shizuo replies, unthinking.  He realizes as soon as Shinra lets a gasp free from his mouth that it was a mistake.

“Were you at _Izaya’s_ house last night?” he exclaims, stopping in the middle of the hallway near his class.

“Uh, y-yeah,” Shizuo says carefully.  He knows where the conversation is going.

“ _Did you two_ -“

Shinra doesn’t get out the rest of his sentence before Shizuo grabs him by the collar and throws him across the room to run into a group of upperclassmen, as Shizuo’s cheeks burn and a vein in his head throbs painfully.  Shinra laments something about betrayal, and then something about Celty, but Shizuo doesn’t stay to hear whatever else he has to say as he stomps on to his own class.

He doesn’t want to know what Shinra was going to say.

Lunch comes quicker than Shizuo expected, and as soon as students come streaming out of classrooms Shizuo is practically _running_ off of school grounds, taking the shortcut to Izaya’s house that the two of them have only ever taken once in all the times they’ve walked home together.

When he gets to the street that will lead him straight to Izaya’s house, he’s completely off-guard, his mind wandering as he thinks of Izaya, and what he could be doing, and the hope that he’s at home, and, briefly, what would happen if he opened the door and Shizuo kissed him.

He shakes the last part off quickly, but it’s more than enough to have him smiling rather than worrying as he makes his way closer and closer to Izaya’s house.

But with the unrestrained relaxation Shizuo is holding in the moment, he doesn’t notice the group of thugs approaching him from either side.

“Heiwajima,” a familiar voice calls, and Shizuo turns to see the source, feeling his blood boil at the sight as much as the sound.  “Thought I would never get the chance to knock your teeth in.”

“What makes you so sure you will?” Shizuo snarls, balling his fists and preparing for a fight.  It’s the gang that has so taken to being after him, and it’s the boss that is spewing insanity across the air, but Shizuo is close to Izaya’s house, close to _Izaya_ , and he can feel himself hesitate to engage even with the seething ire that is accompanying the situation.

“Oh, I’m sure,” the boss says, as his men step in closer toward Shizuo.  “Because you’re going to come with us and do what we say, or _Orihara_ and his two precious little sisters will be in your place instead.”

Shizuo goes completely still.  He can hear and feel the rush of the words, and the too-blatant threat under the thug’s voice, but it’s the content that makes his freeze, and the name that makes him stop breathing, and the proximity to Izaya that makes him go cold with panic.

“What?”

“Don’t make a fuss, just follow us and we’ll leave Orihara and his sisters alone.”  The boss gives an eerie cackle.  “Surprise you?  We’ve got some guys around his house right now, and some more at the Orihara twins’ school, just _waiting_ for me to give the signal to go ahead and take ‘em.”

“You’re lying,” Shizuo growls, or tries, but it just comes out gruff.

”So are you saying that you’re willing to let them die?” the boss snarls, as Shizuo lets his men get closer.

“Izaya can defend himself,” Shizuo tries.

“But his _dear sisters_ can’t,” the boss cackles.  Shizuo huffs.

“So I’m just supposed to believe that if I go with you you won’t just kill them anyway?”

“Yes,” the boss says, coolly.  “I don’t know about you, but I don’t really have a lot of desire to murder little kids for no reason, Heiwajima.”

“And you think that killing them if I won’t go with you is a _reason_?” Shizuo growls.

“I sure do,” is all the boss says, with the same cool tone he adopted halfway through the conversation.

There’s a reasonable chance that Shizuo could beat all of the men here in time to make sure no one was left to order the supposed waiting party into action, but there’s panic snaking along his skin and he can’t bring himself to act on his anger.

With the weight of all three Oriharas that have become so close to him in recent months on his shoulders, he doesn’t dare take the chance that any of them come to harm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can't say I'm totally happy with this chapter... Apologies for being late in posting this!! I've been getting really really busy with work and schoolwork, so chapters are going to be harder to get done from now on. I'll try to post on time with the schedule as much as possible, but please be patient if I'm a day or two late (I don't think I'll be later than that ever). Anyway, as always, hope you enjoyed!!


	27. Edge

Shizuo ends up going with the thugs without putting up a fight.  It’s not ideal, by any means, to be surrounded by a group of half-assed gang members who wouldn’t know what to do if Shizuo were to come charging at them, but he doesn’t have a choice, and doesn’t protest all the way to the warehouse that the gang takes him to.  There’s a half-formed plan in the back of his head that’s just beginning to seem doable — maybe to just beat the shit out of everyone in the warehouse when he gets there and demand _if_ and _how_ Izaya and the twins are in danger — but the plan doesn’t develop past the initial idea before there are doors being opened into the warehouse and Shizuo is stepping inside with the pressing of a frown furrowing his eyebrows and causing the rest of his expression to go taut.

“Please, make yourself at home,” the boss says snidely, giving another cackle as he makes his way toward what looks like a makeshift living room set-up, couch and table included.  There’s even a rug underneath the two, but Shizuo refuses to look at it when he realizes that it’s stained with blood.  “Though you’re not going to be conscious long enough to enjoy it.”

“ _Huh_?” Shizuo is growling as a thug to his right abruptly comes charging at him, holding a bat and yelling something unintelligible that only makes Shizuo the angrier.

As the thug swings to hit Shizuo across the head, another behind him yells and Shizuo hears his fast-paced footsteps come toward him, and it’s only at the last second that Shizuo decides to jump out of the way of the both of them, as he slams his fists against both the men’s faces and steps out of the way as they fall to the warehouse floor.

“Hey!” the boss shouts, standing up from his position on the couch.  “Who the hell said you could do that to my men?”

“Who the hell said I _couldn’t?”_ Shizuo growls back at him, as he stomps over toward the man and leans in with his teeth bared as the boss shrinks back minimally, making his height seem smaller than it really is.  His eyes tell of his fear, but he remains frowning.  “I don’t know why you’re doing this, but you’re stupid if you think you could take me down like that.”

“Didn’t you hear?” the boss snarls.  “You killed my kid brother, _that’s_ why you’re here.”

“I didn’t kill anybody!” Shizuo says, his voice raising and echoing across the expanse of the warehouse.  “Who the hell are you, anyway?”

“Me?” the boss says, feigned innocence raising a taut snarl from Shizuo’s throat.  “I shouldn’t really have to tell you, seeing as you just shrugged off an attempt at murder and injured my men in the process, but I guess I can humor you.  I’m Knuckle.  Or, if you want to know my real name, it’s Okamoto Toshi.  Don’t tell anyone.  Or I just might have to kill you.”

At the last part of his string of statements he laughs, and the thugs around him follow, until Shizuo can feel the urge to throw the guy into the ground run along the very inside of his fingertips.

“And to answer any other questions you may have, this gang here is mine, called the ‘Black Eyes.’  And we’re not after you because you killed my kid brother.”

“Then why the hell _are_ you after me?” Shizuo growls, as Knuckle pulls away from him to fall back against the couch again.  “You know that I didn’t kill him, right?”

“Of course,” Knuckle says.  The lilt in it reminds Shizuo vaguely of Izaya.  “Orihara is nothing but the best informant I’ve ever come across.  It’s quite surprising, given his age.”  He gives a pause as there are snickers around him, for a reason that seems to have passed Shizuo.  “But we’re not after you for that, not anymore.”

“Then _why_?” Shizuo asks again, feeling the clench in his hands cause his nails to dig into his skin.

“You’re good for our reputation,” Knuckle says, shrugging.  “Since that little brat of an informant ruined the one that we had.”

“Good for your reputation?” Shizuo echoes, voice growling over the words.  “How the hell am I good for your reputation and what did Izaya do that _ruined_ it?”

“Orihara?  Let’s just say that that information he was holding against us was enough to put us in the doghouse in this town for the rest of all of our lives,” Knuckle explains, adopting a low growl of his own.

“Information being held against you?”  Shizuo realizes that there’s little reason to inquire further, but curiosity is still very much holding him to it, and for the moment, it seems as though there’s no immediate danger in pursuing the topic.

“Yeah, the little bastard held it against us so we wouldn’t go after you,” Knuckle huffs.  “But when Orihara gave us the name of the real killer I was pissed, so I went after you anyway.”  Shizuo’s clenched fists tighten impossibly, pain finally edging against his skin.  “Turned out he was right, but I didn’t think I had any reason to believe that it was of my own guys that did it.”

Shizuo’s blood, though boiling in ire, goes cold for a moment, in realization of what had happened.  One of the gang’s own, killing the boss’ brother, for a reason that Shizuo cares little about but can’t help feeling tense over.

For a little while, no one says anything, after Knuckle finishes his story, the room going so eerily quiet that Shizuo almost doesn’t believe it’s possible, considering the crowd.  But as the time slowly ticks away, Shizuo’s immediate anger begins to dissipate, and instead panic begins to settle into his veins, as he scans the room to get a good look at what he’s up against.

There’s not a ton of thugs, but enough for Shizuo to get a few cuts and scuffs if he were to take them all on, and on top of that it looks as if none of them have any terribly harmful weapons or dangerous statures, though from the minimal experience Shizuo has had, he knows that looks don’t always tell everything.

But right as Shizuo is beginning to devise another plan in his head, the boss speaks again, clearing his throat before he does so.

“So we’ve got to kill you, to save our gang,” he says, his voice eerily calm.  It’s almost as if he hadn’t stopped talking at all, in between the last time and the expanse of silence that just overtook them.  It makes Shizuo nervous, in a type of situation that he thinks should only make him blindly angry, if the context were any different.  “It’s not personal.”

And three men come out from the crowd of thugs, each holding knives the size of Shizuo’s head, grinning ignorance at him as if they’ve never in their lives had to hear a tale of Heiwajima Shizuo’s strength.  Shizuo snarls, and turns to grab his hands at the base of the wooden table sitting in front of the couch, and swings wide and high as the thugs in front of him halt and gape up at the scene, before scrambling to get away from the impact that hits them as Shizuo is still growling through his first breath.

One of the men breaks away in time to avoid the impact, but the other two slam down onto the ground with a _thump_ , face-first into the pavement of the warehouse as the table settles against their backs.  They groan, and Shizuo takes a moment to appreciate that he didn’t kill them, despite his ire.

The thug that pulled away from the group whips to the back of Shizuo, and as Shizuo is turning to deal with him, too, he slashes his knife across Shizuo’s side, and with the conjured memory of knife fights and the already-fury that is consuming him, it takes no time at all to have this thug on the ground as well, in less than seconds.

Without even the slightest of stutter in his breath, Shizuo turns to Knuckle, feeling the tiny sting in his side and the blood pumping in his veins, and growls a promise as much as it is a prayer, for the still-panic that has decided to hold its grip on him.

_“If you want to get to me, you’re going to have to offer a lot more than that.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The last line was a bit cheesy, but oh well!! Cheesy is fun sometimes lol. Anyways this gang is so dumb like they all have nicknames that are just... horrible. And the name of their gang isn't really any better tbh.  
> It's kind of fun writing a gang that's so plainly lame lmao. Hope you enjoyed! :D  
> Edit: Apologies, but I've had to write so much in the past 2 weeks that I'm getting really close to a burning out on chapter/essay writing (lmao) so the next chapter will be a little later than I wanted, hopefully this week though. Again, I'm really sorry!


	28. Unsafe Precautions

Shizuo never gets tired, during fights.  The only times he can remember when he really ever did was when he was still in elementary school, when the very beginning of his strength was precarious and his body couldn’t quite hold the fury and force that was trying to break free.  But with the distance of years between the last time he even _began_ to feel that way, it’s strange to feel even just the edges of it now.

The once small-looking group of thugs have been coming at him for hours now, dumb and armed with weapons that end up only brushing Shizuo for all the effort he’s exerting to keep them away from him.  After a while though, he can feel his breath panting inside his throat, and can feel the shakiness of exhaustion begin to fold along the insides of his arms and between the bending of his knees, and gives a sudden wonder as to why — if the gang really wanted to kill him — they’re coming at him with sticks as weapons and half-hearted attempts at his life.

Shizuo can _tell_ that they’re not really trying that hard, too.  He recognizes that there’s at least a _little_ intelligence in the boss, and he can’t understand why there is so much overflowing half-heartedness in the thugs’ movements.

“Not ready to curl up on the ground yet, Heiwajima?” Knuckle calls, sounding bored, still sitting slumped against the cushions of the couch that may or may not have blood stains to match the carpet underneath his feet and the bright bleeding of his hair.

“Not in your dreams, either,” Shizuo snarls in response, though he can tell that his breath is becoming thinner with the force of his almost non-stop motion for the past couple of hours.

“That’s too bad,” the boss says.  It sounds too much like Izaya, and Shizuo suddenly finds a bit of extra energy to shove the thug coming at him to his right out of the way so that he can make his way to the obnoxious red hair that is almost as bright as the fury is in Shizuo’s eyes.

“Shut the _fuck_ up already, would you?” Shizuo shouts, before he pushes another few thugs out of his way so that he can smash his knuckles against the side of the boss’ head.

There’s a startling sound at the impact of it, something that Shizuo initially thinks is the cracking of the man’s skull, but then his brain catches up and realizes that the noise is coming from behind him, and as the sting in his knuckles surfaces and the boss collapses against the couch, Shizuo turns to see where the disturbance came from, and in the first sight of what it is, exhales in the most obvious sigh of his life.

At the entrance to the warehouse, Celty has burst in through the doors, her motorcycle whinnying and as she skids to a halt and jumps off the bike just as quickly as her passenger does.  At first, Shizuo can’t tell who it is, with the distance between them and the beginning of haze in his eyes from exhaustion, but then suddenly there’s a shadow-made helmet coming off their head, and Shizuo’s jaw literally drops.

“Izaya,” he shouts, over the noise that the thugs around him are making.  Izaya doesn’t spot Shizuo until he says his name, and as he whips his head around to see, Shizuo notices that his eyes are wide and he’s still in his house clothes, the same ones he had on when Shizuo left his home in the morning.

But before he can begin to rush over, there’s a collision against his back, a pipe, he thinks, and in seeing Izaya and feeling the relief over having both him and Celty here, he feels no hesitation in turning and ripping a growl from his throat as he knocks the assaulter back by just a simple punch.

He’s about to resuming fighting, having found a little bit more energy and excitement to use, but then there’s a shadow being wrapped around his wrist, wresting his movement into stillness that makes Shizuo growl even if he is grateful for it.  Celty gently pulls against it until Shizuo turns and is confronted with her brightly-colored helmet.

 _“Give me a couple minutes to hold them up so we can leave.”_   Celty quickly shows Shizuo the message on her PDA, before Shizuo nods and she lets her shadow go from his wrist.

It leaves him free to continue fighting, if he wanted, but he’s never liked the activity and Izaya is closer to him now than he thought he would be.

“Izaya,” Shizuo says as he stumbles over toward him.  Izaya’s expression is still fading from the wide-eyed unease it showed earlier, and he looks as though he’s trying to seem indifferent to the whole situation, forced smirk pulling up his lips.  “Are you OK?”

“Am I?” Izaya says, with a breathy chuckle.  “Are _you_?”  He sounds like he’s trying to sound level, but at the appended question Shizuo can hear the precariousness of the words, and the first thing he thinks of makes him tremble for a moment in panic.

“Are your sisters OK?” he asks hastily, too fast for anyone who didn’t know him to understand the stumbling words.

“Yeah,” Izaya tells him, easing his expression a little.  “They were bluffing, at least about my sisters.  They didn’t know where their school was.”

“Good,” Shizuo breaths, hanging his head a bit.  “So there _were_ guys at your house then?”  He sees Izaya nod in the corner of his eye.  “Did you fight them off?  Or- Wait, how did you know about the bluff?”  There’s a shout from one of the thugs behind them, and then a thump on the ground near them, and Shizuo can see a withdraw of shadow against the pavement.

“I’m an information broker,” Izaya says smoothly, his voice sounding a little more level this time.  It makes Shizuo relax, and lift his head again to give better attention.  As he does, he unknowingly gives that crooked smile, and Izaya’s eyes flicker with a strange happiness, as his mouth mirrors the look.  “How _wouldn’t_ I know about it?  Especially with these particularly idiotic humans here.”

Shizuo laughs, and Izaya tips his head, his whole face still bright and enough so that Shizuo feels that want to kiss him again.  “Maybe this is the wrong time, but I just realized that your smart-ass remarks aren’t actually all that bad.”

Izaya’s eyes widen a bit, his face beginning to turn red, but then there’s another shout of a thug behind them, and Shizuo has to turn around this time to see the charge of a man coming after him.  He growls, and Izaya breathes a laugh behind his shoulder, before his hand comes out and rests against Shizuo’s shoulder, and there’s a switchblade in the remaining hand before Shizuo can even begin to wonder where it came from.

“Let me handle it, Shizu-chan,” Izaya lilts.  “You look tired.”  It makes Shizuo growl annoyance, despite his previous statement from mere moments ago.

Izaya lets the thug come charging a little closer, his hand still settled against Shizuo’s shoulder, before he lets it fall to his side as he whips around at the last moment and slashes the man under the ribs so he stumbles back with a cry of pain.

Shizuo can feel himself grinning on strange pride, but then there’s another chaotic shout, and this time, he feels a chill of unease at the words that come spilling from the voice.

“You damn brats!” Knuckle shouts, his hand pressing against the side of his head when Shizuo turns to see.  His other hand is holding a gun.  “I’m going to fucking kill the both of you!”

The ring of the bullet ripping out of the gun makes Shizuo’s eyes widen on late realization.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so so sorry for not posting for a while!! I've been crazy busy, and I really didn't want to burn out on this story by forcing myself too much to write it. But I'm back now, and Thanksgiving break is coming up so I should be able to spend a little more time writing this and be able to keep up with the schedule! Thanks for being patient, and I hope you enjoyed!


	29. Rewritten to Pain

Amongst all the chaos erupting around them, Shizuo doesn’t notice what’s really happening until the last second.

There’s a pop of sound and Shizuo’s eyes go wide, and as he stands frozen, there’s a swelling panic in his chest that says _what if it hits Izaya_ , and even the threat of lead poisoning shrinks to nothing as he finds himself jumping out in front of Izaya standing in the possibility of the line of the bullet.

But even as Shizuo can plainly see that the bullet is coming straight toward them, there’s no impact — at Shizuo, the ground, a thug in front of or behind them — and it takes him more than a moment to realize that it’s Celty’s shadow that has stopped the bullet from hitting anything.

“Celty,” Shizuo breaths, sigh clear as any other emotion in his voice.  “Thanks.”

Celty nods, and withdraws her shadow so that the bullet drops harmlessly to the floor, and turns to make her way toward Knuckle, before she’s bombarded with more of his men.

Shizuo snarls, still hovering over Izaya with the whole expanse of his exhausted body, and curls his hands into fists.

“Shizu-chan,” Izaya pipes up from behind him, a bit of shock hidden in his voice.

“What?” Shizuo says, harsher than he wanted.  It doesn’t matter though, as long as Izaya knows that he didn’t really mean the gruffness of it.

“…Nothing,” Izaya gives, attempting a lilt and ending in something like a sigh.

“You god damn _brats_!” Knuckle shouts, stumbling away from the couch, gun in hand.  “Who the _fuck_ do you two think you are?”

Izaya hums and Shizuo can tell there’s a quick-edged remark coming.

“The informant and the beast, haven’t you ever heard of us?” he purrs, that same taunting sound as always breaking away from his throat and past Shizuo’s still-shielding self.  “We should be quite famous, at _least_ with such low-levels as yourself.”

Knuckle growls, and begins to shuffle his way toward Shizuo and Izaya, picking up a pipe on the floor near his foot and tightening his grip on his gun.  He doesn’t give any response to Izaya, but Shizuo knows there’s few things that will get him to stop when he’s begun.

“Oh, what an interesting variety of weapons you have there.  A pipe and a gun.  I wonder who taught you to fight, though?  Could you get past even the great Heiwajima Shizuo and the legendary Orihara Izaya?”

Shizuo snorts, despite the situation.  “Yeah right,” he says, stepping to the side a bit to allow Izaya to fend for himself for a while, the words and the lilt convincing enough to let Shizuo relax.

“I see Shizu-chan here doesn’t agree with me, but pay no mind to him,” Izaya says, his voice dropping strangely low, as if in anger, at the end.  “Just because I don’t have inhuman strength myself doesn’t mean I won’t be going up against you, if that’s what you were thinking.”

“You won’t get a chance,” Knuckle finally says, dragging his body to just a few feet away from the two.  “Not if I have anything to do with it first.”

And suddenly his gun is raised, and without Shizuo ever hearing or seeing it being cocked it’s popping with the obviousness that it’s going to hit something, Izaya clearly in its path.

Without another second thought, Shizuo jumps in front of Izaya again, feeling everything slow in time, feeling the bite of the bullet hit his shoulder as he stumbles to keep his balance against the impact.

He can hear Izaya take a steep and quick inhale, and when he tips his head to look up, Izaya’s eyes are huge, as wide as Shizuo thinks they can go.

“Shizuo,” Izaya says tentatively, his voice shaking a bit.

“I’m fine,” Shizuo says, trying to keep the shaking out of his own voice for all the realization that if he hadn’t stepped in front of Izaya, it would have hit somewhere on his head.  He hisses as Izaya gives a hesitant touch to the bullet wound, and switches quickly to a growl of annoyance instead.  It hurts, but it’s not overwhelming, and it doesn’t seem like he’s bleeding all that much anyway.

“Who the hell _are_ you?” Knuckle asks again, his voice sounding shocked beyond anything offered before.

“You know my name,” Shizuo snarls, shifting his weight to get a better balance of himself as blood trickles down his sleeve.  “The real question is who the hell _you_ think _you_ are that you think you can shoot _me_ and try to shoot _him_ and pretend to send your men after _his sisters_ and really believe you could get _away with it_.”

Rage is burning again, even as he can see Izaya’s worried-bitten eyes on him, even as he can see the too-real threat of the gun still in the boss’ hand.  He can feel a continuous snarl in his throat, the itch in his fists to connect with the man’s face, or his head or his chest, and there’s no stopping him even if anyone tried as Shizuo curls his fist and swings hard to hit the boss’ jaw.

He dodges, which is a bit of a surprise, considering he was able to be knocked out earlier with only one punch.  But as he ducks, he doesn’t try to attack Shizuo any further, as he twists and gives a quick propel of movement over to Izaya, who’s still got wide eyes fixed on Shizuo, but is still holding onto his switchblade, too.

“It’s not worth fighting you anymore, Heiwajima,” Knuckle says, dropping the gun and swinging the pipe over his head.  “Orihara here will be so much more _satisfying_ to kill, so much _easier_.”

He swings hard and high, and Shizuo can’t make it in time before the side of the pipe hits against the front of Izaya’s head before he can even jump back.  It’s Shizuo’s distraction that causes it, he knows it, and as Izaya drops to the ground and blood begins spilling from the wound in his head, there’s nothing but panic quaking through Shizuo’s body.

But then the boss laughs, and through all the confusion and pure panic breathing through every vein in Shizuo’s body, he does everything to allow his body to move and yank the pipe out of Knuckle’s hand to throw it behind him, before knocking him out with nothing more than the pure fury and anxiety that has so consumed Shizuo’s body.

He goes down easily, the wound on his head from earlier still fresh, and in the very breath that he falls to the concrete underneath, Shizuo is by Izaya’s side.

He’s still conscious, which makes Shizuo feel a little better, even if it’s not a physical relief, as he can still feel himself shaking.  But Izaya’s right eye is covered in blood from the wound directly above, and Izaya’s trembling as Shizuo presses his hand against the bleeding, Izaya’s other eye is fluttering in what looks like a fight to keep awake.

“Shit,” Shizuo breaths, trembling so much himself that he can’t pull his own half-blood-soaked jacket off his shoulders fast enough.  “Shit, shit, shit, Izaya don’t pass out.”

Izaya breaths in, shakily, his eye still precarious in its fluttering, and lets Shizuo gently pull the hand covering the wound away from his head as he replaces it with his own jacket, careful to make sure his own blood doesn’t press against the opening in Izaya’s head.  But there’s nothing else that is really being helped; Izaya’s eye is still trying to close, his breathing thinning and his body sinking.

“Izaya,” Shizuo says, grabbing his shoulder with the hand that’s not pressing against Izaya’s head.  It makes Izaya open his eye a bit more, but it begins to flutter closed again almost immediately.  “ _Izaya_ , shit, don’t pass out, don’t pass out, _please_ don’t pass out.”

It seems to work a little, as Izaya strains to force his eye open as much as he can, and his hand comes out to clutch the hem of Shizuo’s shirt.  He works a shaky breath into his lungs, and Shizuo can feel himself relax enough to think to clean the blood off Izaya’s other eye.

He lifts his hand off Izaya’s shoulder, stretching the sleeve of his shirt so it goes over his fingers, as he gently and carefully wipes away the blood from Izaya’s eye.

Izaya makes a weak sound of protest but doesn’t move, and when Shizuo finishes cleaning the blood away Izaya is blinking the eye open, and suddenly both eyes are wide and alert, if a little glazed with pain.

Shizuo rests his hand against Izaya’s shoulder again, tipping his head so he can look at him better, as his panic eases enough for him to give a tiny smile, the crooked one that he knows will make Izaya smile in any situation.

But Izaya isn’t looking at him, and Shizuo’s not even sure he wants to, as his hand clenched in against the hem of Shizuo’s shirt shifts so he can grab at Shizuo’s wrist instead, the movement jerky and the grip a little rough, as he breaths another shaky breath and tips his head down so Shizuo has to shift with him to keep pressure on the wound.

“I’m sorry,” Izaya says, his voice cracking against the syllables.  Shizuo’s jaw drops.  “I’m sorry,” he repeats, tightening his grip against Shizuo’s wrist until there’s a tiny pinprick of discomfort in it.

There’s a million things Shizuo could say to it, _should_ say to it, under the fact that it’s Izaya bleeding from his head against Shizuo’s hands instead of the other way around, under the reality that Izaya’s the one hurt and there’s no one else to blame but Shizuo, for all of this.

But then the trembling turns to jerky shaking, and there’s a dot of water dropping against Shizuo’s kneeling thigh, and there’s nothing else to do but to tighten his grip on Izaya’s shoulder as Izaya begins to cry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaah I'm sorry I'm late in posting this!! My break has been much more hectic than I thought it would be so I hadn't had time to edit this chapter at all until this afternoon! Anyway, hope you enjoyed, and happy belated Thanksgiving if you celebrate! :)


	30. Slower to Hold

Shizuo falls asleep after Shinra finishes fixing the bullet wound in his shoulder, despite his desire to stay up and make sure Izaya is OK.

Not long after the boss went down from Shizuo’s fury-ridden fist, Celty was by Shizuo and Izaya’s side, having broken through the crowd of thugs when they realized that their boss was down.

It had taken a lot less time to get to Shinra’s than Shizuo had anticipated, and when they did get there Shinra was already waiting despite it being in the middle of a school day.  Shizuo hadn’t questioned anything at that point, too frigid with still-ebbing panic.

The injury on Izaya’s head hadn’t been as bad as Shizuo thought either, as he watched with trembling fingers as Shinra fixed him up and Celty worked on at least cleaning up Shizuo’s bullet wound until Shinra was done.

It had been a concussion — that was something Shizuo guessed easily — but Shinra explained that he should be all right, as long as he stayed awake for the night and took it easy for a while.

Shizuo had set it upon himself to watch Izaya for the rest of the day as well as the night, but had ended up falling asleep against Shinra’s couch after Izaya’s condition had been explained, and it’s not until now that he stirs.

“Oh,” Shizuo hears as he slowly blinks his eyes to awareness.  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Izaya?” Shizuo mumbles, before his brain realizes _Izaya_ , and he jumps to alertness as he turns to look at Izaya sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with him on the couch.  “Are you OK?”

Izaya tilts his head.  “You heard Shinra earlier, didn’t you?”

“No, I mean, do you _feel_ OK?” Shizuo clarifies, shifting, although clumsy, in order to tilt himself to the side to have a better position in facing Izaya.

“I feel as good as I can with a concussion.”  Shizuo frowns worry and Izaya manages a breath of a laugh.  His eyes still look faintly red from crying before, and overall he doesn’t seem quite as chipper as usual, but Shizuo has a feeling it’s not because of pain.  “I feel fine, Shizu-chan, it doesn’t hurt all that much.  What about you?”

“Huh?”

“You got shot,” Izaya says, pointing to Shizuo’s shoulder.  His voice is taking on a bit of a strain with the topic.

“Oh,” is all Shizuo begins with.  “I don’t really feel it that much anymore.”

“How predictable of a beast like yourself,” Izaya sighs, his shoulders slumping a bit for a reason that Shizuo doesn’t quite understand.  “Too bad I can’t feel the same toward getting my head bashed in.”  He chuckles, but Shizuo can’t feel any of the lightness from it.

He suddenly tenses, becoming hyper-aware of how close he is to Izaya, and the movements he’s making.  The guilt is catching up with him, now that he’s not littered with immediate panic and his head is a bit clearer from the nap, and there’s an overwhelming feeling that if he moves, even a bit, he may hurt Izaya.

Izaya frowns and tilts his head back to being centered.  “What’s wrong?”

“This was my fault,” Shizuo tells him sadly, his voice tight.  “I wouldn’t blame you if-“

“This wasn’t your fault,” Izaya cuts in, his voice rough with sternness.  It’s loud, and Shizuo wonders if it doesn’t hurt his head to use that kind of volume.  “You weren’t the one who started that rumor.  Just because I ended up having another concussion with you there doesn’t mean it’s your fault.”

“But-“

“Stop blaming yourself.  I did this, I got what I deserved.”  He pauses, looks to the side, away from Shizuo.  “Partly, anyway.”

“What does that mean?” Shizuo asks.

“Nothing,” Izaya says too quickly.  “You’re coming home with me right?  I need someone to keep me entertained anyway, and I don’t really want it to be Shinra.  Or Celty, for that matter.”  There’s still a bit of a frown clinging to his features, but Shizuo doesn’t question it any further.

They sit in silence for a while, Izaya still staring out and away from Shizuo, Shizuo still tensed in fear that any move he makes may hurt Izaya further.  But then Izaya sighs, and his features ease, and he slumps against the couch and bumps Shizuo’s shoulder with his own.  Shizuo can’t help but jump.

“My sisters will be happy I’m hurt,” he says, the attempt at casualness more than apparent in his tone.

“No they won’t,” Shizuo tells him, shifting minimally so that he’s a little farther away from Izaya’s touch.  “They don’t hate you all that much.”

“’That much’,” Izaya echoes, with a little laugh.

“They don’t hate you,” Shizuo says, readjusting his phrasing so Izaya understands.

Izaya doesn’t respond to the comment, and Shizuo’s too focused on the threat his own self possesses in this moment to initiate anything else, so it’s not long before the room goes silent again.  Shizuo assumes Shinra and Celty are off somewhere in a different part of the house, but it makes him frown that there was no one there watching to make sure Izaya was staying awake, since Shizuo himself had fallen asleep.

“Stop acting like something’s going to happen if you relax too much,” Izaya says suddenly.  “I’m not fragile.”

Shizuo sucks in a sharp breath but attempts to relax, if just to secure the halt of Izaya pointing it out.

“It’s my fault,” Izaya says again, quieter this time.  Shizuo tenses again, but doesn’t say anything.  “I assume ‘Knuckle’ told you a little about what happened?”

“Yeah,” Shizuo responds, not recognizing the roughness in his voice.  “Just that you were holding some kind of information against them so they wouldn’t go after me, and that you found the actual killer and gave them that information.”

“Yeah,” Izaya says.  He pauses, long enough that Shizuo almost thinks he’s ended the conversation.  “It seems they weren’t too happy about it initially though, so when they went after you I released the info then.”

“…How’d you find the real killer?”

“Wasn’t that hard,” Izaya says, shrugging.  The movement brushes Shizuo’s shoulder but he tries to relax against the touch as Izaya begins to smirk a bit.  “A couple all-nighters, a few dozen supposed witnesses to talk to, and I got the name eventually.”

Shizuo freezes.  All those days that Izaya seemed upset, tired, more stressed than Shizuo had ever seen — they were all to clear up the rumor that was started, the one that would only negatively effect Shizuo?  He supposes it could be for the simple true justice for the kid that was killed, but Shizuo knows there’s little chance of that to be the case.  Which means the only other option left is one that makes Shizuo’s ribcage swell on the long, slow intake of breath he takes in the initial warmth for Izaya he feels against the truth he has just realized.

“Izaya.”

“Hm?”

“Thank you,” Shizuo says, breathing in the words more than speaking them.  He tips his weight to the side then, letting his shoulder finally give back the touch Izaya has been giving the whole time they’ve been sitting on the couch together.  He sees out of the corner of his eye Izaya’s wide-eyed gaze, fading from the slack almost-feigned casualness, to something softer, that makes Shizuo turn his head and tip his lips into that crooked smile that causes Izaya to immediately offer one back, the lightest and softest smile Shizuo has seen on anyone in his entire life.

Despite the pit of guilt still tugging against his heart, affection wins over in the moment he looks at Izaya.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay, things are getting a lot more busy with finals week coming up and just general end-of-the-semester vibes happening lol. 3 more chapters to go!! They might get posted a little slow, but I'm not abandoning this at all!! Thank you for being patient and I hope you enjoyed! :D


	31. Return and Regret

“What time do we have to be at the twins’ school?”

“When did it become ‘ _we’_?” Izaya sighs, leaning back in his seat.  Shizuo flinches and reflexively reaches his arms out to catch him as if he were falling.  Izaya laughs.  “How nervous of you, Shizu-chan.  I’m capable of balance, you know.”

“Don’t do that kind of shit, flea,” Shizuo says, a huff over the words.  He leans back in his own seat, pushing the palms of his hands against the edge of his desk.  “And you still didn’t answer my question.”

“My apologies,” Izaya drawls, tipping himself back over the space toward the floor again.  “Right after school is when _we’re_ supposed to pick them up.”

“Oh,” is all Shizuo says to it.

The classroom is buzzing with movement and chatter, but Izaya had appeared in the room before Shizuo could rush out himself with his lunch in hand, and Izaya had sat himself at the empty desk across from Shizuo before he had even finished standing up.  Shizuo tries to ignore the irritation of the noise and the crowding groups of students near his desk, sighing out a breath to calm himself.  Then a girl from his class runs past with a soccer ball in her hand, the motion catching and seeming to hold Izaya’s attention.

“What, you think she’s cute or something?” Shizuo hears himself ask too quickly, feeling a frown and a growl sour his features.  He’s not entirely sure why.

Izaya looks over at him with a bit of what Shizuo thinks is shock.  “No,” Izaya says, strangely careful.  “I was just noticing that the soccer ball she had in her hand wasn’t normal.”

Shizuo can feel his frown turn to a scowl, despite the “no” from Izaya’s mouth.  The words sound like an excuse.  “What does that mean?” he snaps.

“It’s got a signature on it, but I couldn’t tell what it said.  I think it was in English.”  Izaya glances over at the girl again, who’s now standing and talking with what Shizuo assumes to be a friend.  Izaya quickly focuses his gaze back to Shizuo though, folding his arms across his chest with a smirk reaching against his face.  “Were you jealous?”

Shizuo’s scowl immediately evaporates, raising his eyebrows to shock and opening his mouth on speechlessness, his face burning until he can see on Izaya’s triumphant face that it’s too obvious to even attempt to hide.

“N-No!” Shizuo splutters, tilting to the side so that his legs swing into the open space between the desks, so he’s facing Izaya.  “Why would I care about who you think is cute?”

Izaya shrugs, his smirk still intact, though Shizuo can see that it’s turning into more of a smile.  “You seemed awfully offended that I was looking at her, and you’re being quite defensive about it now.”  His eyes slip closed as his head tilts back a bit, his mouth pursing before he suddenly slips out of the casual position to point his finger at Shizuo’s face and tip himself so that he’s facing Shizuo as well.  “Wait a minute, Shizu-chan, don’t tell me, do you _like_ me?”

Shizuo gapes.  His face feels so hot that he can feel it down his neck, across his arms.

“O-Of course not!” he says, too loud, but he can’t help it.  “I’m not- Why would I-?”

“Hmm, it seems to me like you’re trying a little too hard to reject the claim,” Izaya says, too calm for the crisis Shizuo is feeling.  “But if you must act like this over the topic, I guess I’ll just have to come back to it later.”  He pauses, and a real smirk creeps up into his features, haughty and teasing and Shizuo knows that nothing good is coming next.  “Perhaps after school today, when we’re _all alone_ at home.”

Shizuo is so embarrassed that he doesn’t follow Izaya anywhere after school.

\---

Despite the calm and the relative normality of the previous day, it’s only been three days since the chaos in the warehouse, and without the comfort of seeing Izaya last in the day yesterday, Shizuo gets caught up in thinking about the gang on the way to school.

It’s not until lunch that he sees Izaya again, this time ushering him to come with Shizuo to the roof instead of having to endure his crowded classroom again.

“What’s the matter?” Izaya asks on the way up to the roof, sliding his fingertips against the edge of the railing up the stairs.

“What?” Shizuo says, looking over at Izaya and realizing with the motion that he’s frowning.  “Oh.  I don’t know, just thinking about the gang.”

Izaya gives him a breath of silence at the answer.  “It’s not that big of a deal,” he says, though his voice has taken on strain.  “They won’t bother us anymore.”

“How do you know that?” Shizuo asks, halting his motion so that Izaya stops too, so that they’re standing right in the middle of the staircase.

Izaya isn’t smiling, or smirking, and it makes Shizuo uneasy under the already-present worry over him.  He finds his eyes flickering over to the bandages over Izaya’s head and he takes in a shaky breath.

“I know things,” Izaya tells him.  “I promise, they’re not going to do anything else, Shizu-chan, it’s taken care of.”

“ _What_ is taken care of, Izaya?” Shizuo says, almost shouting the words.  He lowers his voice when he catches the bandages in his vision again.  “How do we know they won’t come after you again, or find your sisters this time?”

Izaya frowns then, his expressionless face moving to stress, irritation, a little bit of confusion.  “They won’t.  They won’t come after you, either.  The boss is going to jail for murder, and the main portion of the gang in charge of all the killing they were doing is going along with him.”

“What about everyone else?  Won’t they want revenge or something?”

“If they do they’re probably not going to act on it, at least not strategically.  I’ve got an eye out for them still, but there’s no use in worrying over it, especially when it’s this small of a gang.  They won’t go after us.”

Shizuo can feel a growl in his throat, the edges of his nails digging into the palm of his hands.  But he doesn’t say anything to question what Izaya is telling him — not that he needs to; he believes Izaya, but there is still worry and anger surging through him to make him still feel perturbed about the whole thing.

They stand there for a little while longer in more or less silence, the only sound between the two of them the low humming of a growl in the back of Shizuo’s throat.

But Izaya’s head is tipped down, and Shizuo knows that can only mean one thing, even before Izaya speaks again.

“You don’t have to continue to hang around me,” he says, low, as if he truly cares who hears their conversation.

“What?” Shizuo says, his growl immediately breaking away.  “Why would I have any reason to stop?”

“I could create some other situation like this.”

“ _Are_ you?”

Izaya looks up then.  “What?”

“ _Are_ you going to create another situation like this?”

Shizuo’s only seen Izaya look overly shocked maybe once, twice, in his life, but the amount of pure surprise on his face now sweeps over it all.  His eyes are huge, crimson in the catching sunlight behind Shizuo, his mouth agape but soft, his whole body frozen completely but still holding some kind of pliant look to it.

Izaya doesn’t say anything, but Shizuo doesn’t need him to answer verbally to know that there is confirmation in his silence, and relief, if he knows Izaya at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait!! I've got lots of tests next week, and then the week after that is finals, so it's going to be pretty sparse as far as the time I have to write and edit this, so thank you for understanding and being patient! I hope you enjoyed this chapter! :D


	32. Tried and Tripped

“I’ve got to stop by the twins’ school after this and talk to their teacher,” Izaya says as he and Shizuo walk toward the entrance of the school.  “You can go on ahead; I’ve got the key to the house, unless you want to use your brute strength to break in.”  He flashes a quick smirk but Shizuo ignores it.

“I’ll come with you,” he says quickly, picking up his pace so that he’s more or less stumbling to follow Izaya so closely.

Izaya turns his head around to look at him and frowns.  “You don’t have to,” he tells Shizuo, stopping in front of the locker that holds his shoes.  “It shouldn’t take long.  It’s going to be boring anyway.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Shizuo says.  “It’s not like I’ve never sat through something boring before.”  He starts to make his way to pick up his own shoes, keeping his gaze on Izaya until he turns the corner to the second row of lockers.

“Hmm, I guess so.”  Izaya pauses, and Shizuo hears the creak of the metal locker.  “If you’re going to be _that_ lonely without me around.”

Shizuo turns red, and ducks his head to the thankfulness of being out of Izaya’s line of sight.  He focuses instead on getting his shoes on and leaving his school ones in the locker, before jogging over to where Izaya is standing at the doors to the school, head over his shoulder, smirking something lazy and faintly amused.

They walk the short way to the school, the way that passes them by a little old lady’s house with her dog, and Shizuo can’t help but smile and swallow a laugh as Izaya frowns at the bark it gives as they walk past, his footsteps trailing closer to Shizuo’s.

By the time they’ve made it to the twins’ school they’ve said less than 10 words to each other, but Shizuo doesn’t worry too much about it when he catches a glance at Izaya’s for-once almost blank face.  It’s an unusual expression, but somehow it doesn’t make Shizuo uneasy.

“Good afternoon!” a young woman says as the pair enter the building, both slipping their shoes off quickly.  “Oh, you’ve brought a friend, Izaya-kun?”

“I have,” Izaya says smoothly, letting Shizuo step into the space before him.  “This is Heiwajima Shizuo; he’s quite famous around Ikebukuro, I would be surprised if you haven’t heard of him.”

Shizuo flinches and shoots Izaya a glare, but he only widens his smirk and lets his eyes soften a bit before directing his glance back to the woman.

“I don’t think I have.  What are you famous for, Heiwajima-kun?” she asks, stepping aside to allow the two to enter.

“Uh-“

“You _haven’t_ heard of him?” Izaya suddenly lilts, feigned gasp more audible than it should be.  “I’m quite surprised, Mika-san!  You seem like the kind of person to listen to city gossip.”

“Not really,” Mika chirps.  “I’m a little busy with everything here.”

“Understandable,” Izaya says, nodding.  “Speaking of, what did my sisters do this time?”

“Oh, the twins aren’t in any kind of trouble,” Mika says.  “For once, at least.  They actually did something quite nice, this time.”

Izaya raises his eyebrows.  “And what could that be?”

“They asked me to bring you here.”

“Huh?”  Izaya tilts his head, his eyebrows furrowing.

“Iza-nii!” comes an over-heightened voice from the right of Shizuo, as well as a tinier “Nii-san” appended behind the first voice.

The twins appear out of nowhere, and before Shizuo can get his bearings on what’s happening, Mairu is pulling at the leg of his pants and looking up at Izaya, while Kururi is clinging to the hem of Izaya’s shirt as he stumbles over to allow her to continue holding on, his face wiped to shock.

“I knew you would bring Shizu-nii with you,” Mairu says, giggling.

“Accepted,” Kururi appends.

“This is what I was called here for?” Izaya chuckles.  “So you two could come and attack us instead of going home like I told you to do?”

“As a thank you for saving us!”

Izaya blinks the smile off his face.  “How did you know about that?”

“When you were talking with Shizu-nii the other night,” she tells him, looking up at Shizuo.  Izaya makes a move of looking at Shizuo, too.

“D-Don’t look at me, you said they were asleep,” Shizuo says, face turning red from the full-on crimson stare Izaya is giving him with his face still soft on surprise.

“Saving them?” Mika asks, hesitantly.  Shizuo thinks she probably knows a bit about what Izaya does, just from her tone.

Izaya tips his head to the side, smirk melting back into his features.  It’s obvious to Shizuo that a lie is sharp on his tongue.  “It’s a game, but the last time we played I let them win so they would be ‘saved’ from having to do all the cooking for a week.”  Mika frowns.  “It was their idea for a punishment of their losing.”

“Huh?  Iza-nii what are you-“

“Let’s go home,” Shizuo says over Mairu’s lilt, which takes a bit of extra volume than Shizuo is use to.  Both Mika and Izaya look over at him.  “We were gonna stop and get something to eat, right?  We probably want to go before it gets dark.

It’s a lie, but it doesn’t feel quite as bitter on his tongue when Izaya smiles at him for it.

\---

“That was quite a performance,” Izaya says once they’ve made it to his house, sisters in tow.  The twins run off as soon as they’ve closed the door, and Shizuo sighs and sinks into the couch before Izaya has even finished taking his shoes off.  “Even though it was a small lie.  Maybe I should let you take me out on a date for it anyway.”

Shizuo nearly falls off the couch.  “W-What?!”  Izaya smirks and comes around to sit next to him.  “I don’t want to-“  But then Izaya raises his eyebrows and looks over at him, and Shizuo wouldn’t be able to lie in this context even if he continued speaking.

“You’re so lame Shizu-chan,” he more or less sighs, smirk turning into a smile.  “Don’t you want to go out on a date with me?  It might even be more fun than fighting thugs together.  Or maybe that could _be_ our date.”

“No,” Shizuo says immediately, though his face is burning and he can barely let himself look at Izaya.  “I mean, if—“  Shizuo takes in a breath.  “Yeah, I-I would go on a d-date with you.  Just not fighting thugs.”

Shizuo doesn’t think Izaya was expecting the answer, because while his gaze is still fixed at the edge of the couch, there’s no response whatsoever to the comment, not even a hum of acknowledgement.  But then Shizuo finally gathers the courage enough to look up again, and is met immediately with a look on Izaya’s face that is about as baffled as he’s ever seen him.

“What?” Shizuo asks, frowning.

Izaya’s mouth shifts, until it looks like he’s chewing on the very edge of his lip.  “Nothing,” he says, his voice bright with surprise.  “What did you expect me to say to that?”

Shizuo shakes his head.  “You were the one who brought the topic up.  What did you expect _me_ to say?”

“Something more along the lines of ‘shut up’,” Izaya admits, finally pulling his gaze away from Shizuo.  He pauses.  “Aren’t you going to go home at some point?”

Shizuo manages a smile around the blush that’s burning his face.  “Nah, you’re stuck with me for a while more.”

Izaya groans, but is smiling too.  “Then you’re making me dinner.”

“Fine with me,” Shizuo sighs, leaning back against the couch again.  Izaya follows his movement with no hesitation.

Even with the burning thought that it could be wrong, Shizuo spends a few moments enjoying the feeling of liking Izaya.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again, and Merry Christmas if you celebrate it!!! I'm so sorry for not posting for such a long time, but things got really busy with tests and finals week and general Christmas stuff and I hadn't had time to write or edit at all. But there's only one more chapter to go, and I hope to get it out by Wednesday. Thank you so much for being patient! Hope you enjoyed the chapter!! :D


	33. Mend and Capitulate

“Shizuo.”

It’s too loud, too close.  Shizuo can’t think straight, or even walk straight, it seems.  His feet keep hitting the ground—he can see it—but it doesn’t feel like it, and it makes him stumble and run over parts of the ground that he’s already walked on, until it’s cracked and ash-colored and rubble.  It sends panic throughout his body, that just a second step over the pavement could do something so horrendously damaging, that _he_ could be the cause of that damage.

“Shizuo.”

He hears it again, and there’s no flicker of doubt in his mind now that the voice could belong to anyone other than Izaya.  He turns his head lazily at first, despite the unease running along every limb he owns, but when he doesn’t catch a glimpse of anyone, let alone Izaya, he frowns and attempts to look around again, his head moving faster this time.

He’s stopped walking completely at this point, but can still feel a weird tug of pressure along the insides of his ankles.  When he looks down for just a moment, he jumps when he realizes that his feet are sinking into the now-crushed pavement, the pieces left by his strength turning a sickening red color.

“Shizuo.”

The voice is there again, Izaya no doubt—again—and Shizuo abandons the panic of what’s at his feet for the immediacy of finding out what Izaya wants, and maybe to ask him if he knows why the entire ground is bleeding against his shoes.

His heart is pounding and he can’t quite breathe, as if the air itself is pulling away from him in order to eradicate what has been polluting the city for 16 years too long.  Shizuo can’t find Izaya, or even catch the tiniest of hints that Izaya is here, other than the sparse voice that has only ever been spilling out as Shizuo’s name, since he began hearing it.

He can feel the blood making its way up to his knees now, and hears himself inhale the shakiest breath he didn’t know was possible to make.  His whole body is shaking too, trembling against every touch of the gravel at his feet that is crumbling away around the blood pooling against the destruction; he can see the grass beneath it all, dying the moment Shizuo’s blood-stained shoes touch it.

_“Shizuo!”_

Finally when Shizuo turns his head for a third time, Izaya is there against the sound of his own voice, causing Shizuo’s shoulders to drop a little and the blood at his feet to fade into the range of not-feeling.  But Izaya’s not smiling, or smirking, or calling Shizuo by the nickname he’s always hated, up until recently.  He’s tied up instead, farther away from Shizuo than he had first thought, held down from movement against a piece of metal that looks far too close to the poles Shizuo himself has pulled out of the ground during fights before.

Izaya’s face is turning purple and red and pale all at once as Shizuo is watching, eyes going dark and mouth splitting to the obvious touch of bruising and blood, while his whole body sinks against the back of the pole and his hands stop struggling at the ties that Shizuo only now realizes is split rope.  A group of thugs appears next to him, catching Shizuo’s attention away from the bleeding on Izaya’s skin, and one of the three growls something almost as low as Shizuo’s near-daily snarls.

“Look what you’ve made us do, Heiwajima,” he says, tapping a suddenly-there bat against Izaya’s knees.  Shizuo can hear Izaya whimper even from the far-away stance he has.  “Did you want little Orihara here to die?  It kind of seems like you did, from the way you set this all up.”

“What are you talking about?” Shizuo snarls, in the same range as the thug’s growl.  He can feel the blood against his thighs now.

“He’s going to die,” a second thug says.  His voice is higher than the first, more joyous, and Shizuo doesn’t like him any better.  “You’ve done too much to us for us to let him live, now.”

“That’s right,” the third one pipes up.  Shizuo doesn’t pay attention to his voice any more than he’s paid attention to any of their faces.  “Orihara’s important to you, isn’t he?  We wouldn’t want to get the wrong person and not cause you enough pain.”  There’s a cackle from all three of them, but Shizuo barely processes it.

 _“What are you talking about?”_ Shizuo yells this time, but there’s nothing else in between as a gunshot rings out and a bullet smashes the back of Izaya’s skull, and Izaya falls to Shizuo’s feet before he can even stop frowning fury and panic at the thugs’ not-there faces.

It takes no time for Shizuo to look down, for the thugs to disappear, for the blood at his thighs to become Izaya’s, for the pooling of it at his feet to become Izaya’s, for the destruction around it turn into Izaya himself, gunshot wound in his head and blood falling from it to become Shizuo’s fault.

It’s _Shizuo’s fault_ , as he looks down at his full-on shaking hands, covered with the fresh blood of Izaya, of his best friend, of the only person who’s ever gotten hurt at Shizuo’s hand and not feared him, hated him, for it.

Izaya’s dead, there’s no doubt about it, and there’s panic all along Shizuo’s body, hatred for what he has done all against the inside of his head, his vision going blurry from something he truly, in this moment, can’t put his finger on.  He can feel his throat close and tighten and shriek against the sound of something full of pain and what he thinks, briefly, is regret, and suddenly he’s awake, face wet with tears and breathing fast enough to match the sprint of his heartbeat.

He’s lucky he’s not screaming.  It’s the middle of the night, when he glances over at his clock, and if he had been truly making the sound that ripped from his throat in the nightmare his entire family would be awake right now, and there would be no way he could face anyone with the image of Izaya’s dead body still flickering in his mind.

Instead he attempts to calm himself down, stumbling out of bed and making his way to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face because he’s seen in the movies that that kind of thing works; but when he does it there’s no decrease in his fast-paced breathing or in the dizzy feeling in his body or in the shaking or the fear.

He knows that Izaya must be alright right now.  It’s 2 in the morning on a Thursday, and even though they went and saw Celty yesterday Shizuo doesn’t think there’s anything out of the ordinary that could possibly be putting Izaya in danger.  That is, until his mind starts to reel with the image of Izaya’s blood in his hands, and Shizuo begins to involuntarily name off a list of things that could have really happened to Izaya tonight in between the 3 hours he hasn’t seen him.

He doesn’t hesitate in leaving the house.

\---

When he knocks on Izaya’s door, Shizuo is still shaking.  His heart has settled down a bit, and so has his breathing, with the movement to distract him a little and the chill of the night to drive away some of the panicked thoughts he’s been thinking since he woke up.

It takes longer than usual for Izaya to answer the door, and in rationality Shizuo knows it’s just because of the time of night, and knows that Izaya must be sleeping like the whole rest of the city.  But even so it still makes Shizuo stumble over a shaky breath and have to lean against the wall next to the front door, as he waits for an answer to his knocking that he desperately hopes will come.

It does, of course.

“Shizu-chan?” Izaya mumbles as he swings the door open, slouching and still blinking his eyes away from sleepiness.  Though the nickname soothes Shizuo’s panic a bit, he supposes he doesn’t look too good as Izaya looks him up and down, giving a frown.  “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” Shizuo says, as he darts his eyes across Izaya’s head as if looking for a wound; but he’s panting again, and he can hear the word break in his throat, and all at once his vision goes blurry again and he has to sink down onto the ground so that he doesn’t have to support his trembling body as he lets himself cry.

“Shizuo?!”  Izaya sounds much more awake now, as Shizuo hears the creak of the door swing all the way open.  Izaya’s hand touches Shizuo’s shoulder and he jumps, but Izaya doesn’t break the contact.  Shizuo couldn’t be more grateful for anything else in this moment.

It takes a long while for Shizuo to calm himself down, focusing on the touch of Izaya’s hand at his shoulder instead of the image of Izaya himself on the ground and covered in blood.  When he finally stops crying though, he’s embarrassed, and doesn’t look up.

“…At least come inside, it’s too cold out to be standing in the doorway,” Izaya says, surprisingly soft in sound and tone.

Shizuo manages to lift his head and nod, though doesn’t dare make eye contact.  Izaya’s hand finally slides away from Shizuo, though he manages to continue some form of contact as they both stand and he leans to the side to keep his arm brushing against Izaya’s.

Izaya closes the door, and lets out a breath.  He doesn’t turn the lights on.

“What happened?” he asks.

Shizuo doesn’t know how to begin to answer.  “…I had a nightmare,” he finally tells him.

Izaya tilts his head a bit as he walks to the couch, Shizuo close behind.  “That was so bad that you ran all the way here and started crying at my doorstep?”

Shizuo flinches at Izaya’s teasing tone as he sits down next to him, but takes minimal comfort in how normal and not-hurt he sounds.  “Yes,” he says, hearing it sound like more or less a growl.  “I thought you were really dead.”

Izaya freezes in the corner of Shizuo’s eye, his own eyes going wide.  “Oh,” is all he says.  “That’s… that’s what the dream was about?”

“Yes,” Shizuo says, quieter this time as he realizes that the twins must still be sleeping.  “…I wanted to make sure you were OK.”

“I am,” Izaya tells him immediately.  His voice is softer and more hushed than Shizuo has ever heard it.  “I’m OK.”

“I know.”  Shizuo takes in a breath and slumps against the cushions of the couch, feeling himself still trembling minimally against Izaya’s shoulder.  “I just…”  He breaths in deeply instead of finishing the sentence.

Izaya doesn’t question what Shizuo was going to say anyway.  Instead he turns so that he’s facing Shizuo, hands falling at the part of the cushion in between them to hold his weight up.  Shizuo manages to let himself make eye contact with Izaya, forcing his gaze away from his head as he watches curiously at the shift of Izaya’s lips before he speaks.

“How did I die?” he asks, and Shizuo frowns at the unexpected question.

“What?”

 _“How did I die?”_ he repeats, with a lilt this time.  “If you talk about it the dream won’t come back, you know.”

“But-“

“Was it really that bad?”

Shizuo snaps.  “Yes!” he snarls, grabbing Izaya by the wrist, careful not to press too hard.  His fingers shake with the effort.  “Some thugs had you tied up to a pole and they beat you up and shot you in the head and then you fell and somehow it was me who did it!”  Shizuo catches his eyes at Izaya’s head again, feeling a pang of momentary panic, then tips his head down and swallows hard.  “I had your blood all over my hands, I knew I killed you.”

“Didn’t you just say the thugs shot me though?”

Shizuo looks up, and Izaya is looking at him with faint amusement in his eyes and a small smirk at his lips.

“Yeah, but then you fell and I had your blood all over me.”

“Doesn’t mean you’re the one who killed me.”

Shizuo frowns.  “That’s not the point,” he says.  “I still _thought_ I killed you, in the dream.”

“But you didn’t,” Izaya says.

“N-No, I guess not but-“

“There, problem solved!” Izaya says cheerfully, right over Shizuo’s words.

“Problem?  That wasn’t the _problem_ , I-“

“That _was_ the problem, though,” Izaya tells him.  “You thought you killed me, in the dream, and you thought something bad happened to me, in real life, so you came here and I’m denying both things, which means the problem is solved.”  Shizuo doesn’t say anything, his mouth left agape on shock.  “You don’t need to feel bad about it, Shizu-chan, it was just a dream.  I’m alright,” he appends, in a much softer tone.

“…Alright,” Shizuo says, in echo of Izaya’s hushed words.

It’s only then that Shizuo realizes how close they are, with Shizuo’s hand still wrapped around Izaya’s wrist, though gently.  Their faces are closer than Shizuo thought, too, and he lets his eyes wander down to Izaya’s lips at the realization of it.

Izaya doesn’t move, but neither does Shizuo.  He doesn’t know what to do, even though the rational part of his brain is telling him to pull away, to make his way back home before his parents take notice of his absence; but then Izaya takes a breath, and Shizuo leans in before he can stop himself.

He leans in, his whole body aching with worry and affection and warmth, his hand on Izaya’s wrist sliding up to his head, trembling against the surprisingly softer-than-usual dark of his hair.

At first he thinks Izaya will pull away, or try and push Shizuo off, but then he presses his lips against Izaya’s and Izaya presses back, for just a moment, before Shizuo feels his mouth raise on a smile and he pulls away by a fraction with a breathy laugh.

“I thought you said you didn’t like me,” he says, more or less still pressed against Shizuo’s lips.

All the unease Shizuo felt before has left him, with the immediate touch of Izaya’s lips on his own, and with the added sound of Izaya’s laugh and teasing in his ears, he can’t resist the crooked smile that dances across his lips.

“And I thought you said you were going to let me take you out on a date,” Shizuo tells him, before watching Izaya smile wider at the response as he catches his gaze at Shizuo’s own crooked lips.  Shizuo can’t resist the urge to lean back in so that they’re kissing again.

Shizuo can’t even remember what the feeling of Izaya’s blood felt like when he has his hand pressed up against the side of it now, his lips pressed against Izaya’s.  But it doesn’t matter.

He doesn’t think about the nightmare again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was going to wait and post this in the morning, but I was too excited not to post it now!!! Finally, we get to the end. I'm actually pretty proud of this chapter and this ending as a whole, and I hope you like it as well! I started this fic like 4 months ago on a whim and I never thought so many people would enjoy it. Thank you all for reading and leaving kudos and comments and bookmarks! I've got some one-shots for this series planned and another longer fic as well that will take place after they've graduated high school, so I hope you look forward to that! I also have a longer and more complex idea for another shizaya piece in the works as well as a shorter multi-chapter one, and I'm excited to write and share those. Again, thank you so much and I hope you enjoyed! :D


End file.
